Normal service is resumed!

Further to yesterday’s mail to those of you on our mailing list and my post here, I’m delighted to be able to report that our online booking system is now fully recovered from its temporary glitch and fully open for business as usual.

Again, apologies for any inconvenience this temporary glitch may have caused.

Whether the resolution was dropping a key down the system’s back, making my laptop drink a glass of water upside down, me holding my breath, or the full and frank discussions with the Elvish branch of ACAS, I neither know nor care. The main point is that the hiccough is history, and normal service is resumed. Hurrah!

Our happy elves, ready and waiting to process your online bookings again!

As a small way of thanking you for your patience, might a sneak preview of our soon-available-for-booking January programme of courses be of interest…?

Yes? Well… in that case, it’s time to call upon the fanfare phalanx…

Et voila!

Monday evenings:

From Stone to Iron: Pre-historic cultures and the birth of Europe (10 weeks)

Tuesday afternoons:

The Voyages of Discovery: Exploration, power, and profit (10 weeks)

Tuesday evenings:

Changing Times: A Cultural History of Europe, 1848-1914 (1o weeks)

More details on those to follow asap, but for now, I hope you like the sound of them (the titles are, we think, fairly self-explanatory!). So. So far so normal - ten-week courses in three of our now-traditional diary slots.

So why, I hear you ask, have we been asking you all how you feel about shorter courses recently? Well, this is where we’re mixing things up a bit…!

Whilst Changing Times is a ten-week course, it consists of two complementary parts, which can be booked separately. Thus if you’re unable or unwilling to commit to a full ten weeks on this, you can register instead for the first five weeks or the second five weeks - each of which will be a perfectly formed course in its own right. How’s that for mixing things up?!

Said perfectly formed courses are

Realism and Revolution (5 weeks)

and Fin de Siècle (5 weeks)

And as if that weren’t enough exciting experimentation for one term… we’re not offering a ten-week course in our usual Wednesday slot. Instead, we present, for your delight and delectation, a smörgåsbord of tasty Short & Sweet Schooldays courses - just the same as our now-established Short & Sweet Saturdays (2 sessions of 2.5 hours each), but on a Schoolday (Wednesday afternoons) instead! In no particular order (we’re still working that out), what we have on the table at this stage are:

Northern Light: Landscape, history, and the sublime in Scandinavian art, 1815-1900

The Mandate of Heaven: Ancient China

Persia's Golden Age

So now I’ve got the wherefores out of the way, voila a summary, in case it will help:

How does that all sound? We’re hope you’re as excited about these - both in terms of content and in terms of format - as we are! We’ll be fine-tuning various details over the next week or two, and shall let you know as soon as they’re open for booking.

In the meantime, to see all our courses now available in calendar order, please click here.