Much Ado about Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times’

Posted on: September 4th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

What do poetry, astronomy, arithmetic, music, accountancy and ciphers have in common? The answer: Shakespeare!

In this highly acclaimed talk, award-winning author Rob Eastaway reveals the surprising connections between Shakespeare and the fascinating world of numbers. Drawing on quotations from a wide range of the Bard’s works, from Macbeth to Romeo and Juliet and beyond, Rob explores how numbers, calculation, and measurement quietly shaped everyday life in Shakespeare’s time.

Along the way, he reveals how Tudors multiplied, why dice games were a risky business, and why Shakespeare really did make much ado about nothing. From arithmetic and accounting to music and astrology, this talk offers captivating glimpses into history, learning, and the scientific thinking of the Renaissance.

Lively, accessible, and full of surprises, Much Ado About Numbers celebrates a time when every subject was connected — and learning was full of wonder.

Practical Information

Booking is essential.

Accessibility Information

Please contact us regarding any specific accessibility requirements you may have by emailing events@manlitphil.ac.uk

Manchester Lit & Phil Literary October Book Club

Posted on: August 12th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

A 900-page portrait of nineteenth century provincial life, George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch frequently tops polls for the greatest novel of all time – as voted by writers, academics and critics.

Virgina Woolf called it ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ and, more than a century later, Martin Amis declared it ‘a novel without weaknesses.’

Set just before the Reform Act of 1832 and the arrival of railways, England is on the brink of massive social change. Eliot’s characters too want to change the world. But the reality of their ideals ends up changing them.

Join us to discuss whether Middlemarch lives up to its reputation as the greatest novel in the English language.

The Lit & Phil Literary Book Club is free and exclusively for members, operating on a first come first serve basis, up to a maximum of 15 people.

Save the date and start reading

November 24 book club: 1984, George Orwell (contemporary fiction).

Book now

Lit & Phil Literary Book Club: Tuesday October 27

Book: Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Time: 6.15pm to 7.45pm

Location: Chief Librarian’s Office, Third Floor, Manchester Central Library, St Peters Square, City Centre, M2 5PD

‘Refugees Welcome! Manchester: The City of Immigration…’

Posted on: August 12th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

Manchester has a long and honourable tradition of welcoming people from around the world – refugees, immigrants, visitors, tourists. This has included Irish, Jews, Italians, Indians, Chinese, Germans …

The city has always welcomed those from afar, echoing the words of Pericles, the enlightened 5th century BC ruler of Athens, who proclaimed: “We throw our city open to all, and never, by the expulsion of strangers, exclude anyone from either learning or observing things”.

This is a tour of the locations where the history of immigration has been made and includes:

• The Free Trade Hall where Paul Robeson, the great American radical activist, spoke on a number of occasions.
• The Chinese Arch on Faulkner Street
• The Midland Hotel where Winston Churchill made his famous “aliens” speech.
• The Little Ireland plaque near Oxford Road station.
• The Dancehouse where Jomo Kenyatta, later first president of Kenya, taught African tribal dance in the 1940s.
• Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall which hosted the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the 80th anniversary of which was recently celebrated.

Tour led by Ed Glinert of New Manchester Walks, author of the epic history “Manchester: The Biography”.

Meeting Place
Starts at 6 p.m. outside the site of the Lit & Phil’s 20th Century HQ, 36, George Street, Chinatown.

Manchester Lit & Phil Literary September Book Club

Posted on: August 12th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, successful businessman Joe Keller has made a comfortable life for his family. But when a figure returns from his past, secrets are revealed and the price of the American dream is laid bare.

All My Sons was Miller’s first successful play on Broadway, launching his career, winning him a prestigious Tony award, and establishing him as one of America’s greatest dramatists. As much an exploration of the primacy of family as it is an indictment of greed, and capitalism, the play explores the tension between self-interest and idealistic integrity and is remembered as one of Miller’s greatest works.

Join us to discuss whether All My Sons continues to deserve its place in the hall of fame.

The Lit & Phil Literary Book Club is free and exclusively for members, operating on a first come first serve basis, up to a maximum of 15 people.

Save the date and start reading

October 27 book club: Middlemarch, George Eliot (classic fiction).

November 24 book club: 1984, George Orwell (contemporary fiction).

Book now

Lit & Phil Literary Book Club: Tuesday September 29

Book: All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

Time: 6.15pm to 7.45pm

Location: Chief Librarian’s Office, Third Floor, Manchester Central Library, St Peters Square, City Centre, M2 5PD

“O Lord, Open the Eyes of the King of England”

Posted on: August 3rd, 2026 by Editor-Jo

In October 1526, book browsers outside St Paul’s Cathedral were shocked when a large run of a 700-page anonymous volume appeared. It was a first – a Bible in English – and it came courtesy of William Tyndale, who had been forced to go to Worms in Germany to get it published.

It was then illegal for the Bible to be in English, and copies had been smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth. They were soon being burned outside St Paul’s. Those caught in possession were made to ride seated backwards on a donkey wearing boards on which the pages of the offending work were pasted. They then had to throw the boards into a fire as a warning of their own fate should they continue reading the banned translation.

Ed Glinert of New Manchester Walks and author of “Manchester: The Biography” relates the terrifying story on the 500th anniversary of the events.

Practical Information

The talk includes a Q&A session.

Booking is essential. Lit&Phil members: we recommend logging into the website to make booking your free member ticket quicker and easier.

Accessibility Information

The venue is wheelchair accessible with an accessible toilet on the ground floor. Please contact us regarding any specific accessibility requirements you may have by emailing events@manlitphil.ac.uk

How Parasites Have Shaped Us

Posted on: July 14th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

Life is give and take, unless you’re a parasite. Biological processes are expensive, and parasites know how to cut the costs by claiming a warm, wet home inside someone else. Let me be your tour guide around the world of wriggly worms and pesky protozoa and how they have shaped our biology and society.

Practical Information

The presentation will include time for questions and answers. Booking is essential.

Accessibility Information

The venue is wheelchair accessible with an accessible toilet on the ground floor. Please contact us regarding any specific accessibility requirements you may have by emailing events@manlitphil.ac.uk

Manchester City Centre Peace Trail No 2 – A Guided Walk

Posted on: June 24th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

Join a guided walk exploring Manchester’s rich peace and social history.

A guided walk around parts of the Manchester Peace Trail, starting at the Turing Statue in Sackville Park at 10.45am for 11.00am. The accessible route will take us via HOME and the Peterloo Memorial, to finish in St Peter’s Square around 1.00pm.

On the way we will consider

  • Alan Turing and gay rights
  • Engels, Peterloo and the popular reform movement
  • Lydia Becker, Margaret Ashton, the Suffragists and Suffragettes
  • John Dalton, Ernest Rutherford and the nuclear time-line, free-thinking, education and science
  • and the various peace and radical memorials in Central Library.

Join volunteer walk leader and peace activist Steve Roman for an illuminating and inspiring guided walk along parts of the Manchester Peace Trail. This walk complements the Literary & Philosophical Society walk he led in April.

Journeying through the Peace Trail will bring alive Manchester’s history of research which was to lead to the development of the atom bomb. Also covered will be its radical history, its growth as the world’s first industrial city and its importance as a centre for peace, tolerance and the promotion of social justice in the city and around the globe. Buildings and locations will gain new meanings as we learn about their peace history and the relevance for social justice movements. www.discoverpeace.eu

The guide is donating his fee to charity

Location

Meet at 10:45am at the Turing Statue in Sackville Park.

Careering Through Astronomy

Posted on: June 22nd, 2026 by Alan Wareham

We are thrilled to present this talk by Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

About the Speaker

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has made many exceptional contributions to physics, as ground breaking researcher, as a leader of learned societies and as an inspirational ambassador for public engagement.

As a PhD student at Cambridge University, she was involved in opening up a new branch of astrophysics through her involvement in the discovery of pulsars, a particular class of neutron star. She has used telescopes flown on high altitude balloons, launched on rockets which carried satellites and built a radio telescope in Cambridgeshire.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a well-known figure in the world of public understanding of science and is a physicist who, while conducting research for her doctorate, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. This discovery later earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974, but she was not among the awardees.

Since that time, In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3 million (£2.3 million) prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists.  In 2021, Bell Burnell became the second female recipient (after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1976) of the Royal Society’s Copley Medal.

Jocelyn has served on many boards and panels throughout Europe, including serving as President of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics.

Practical Information

The presentation will include time for questions and discussion. Booking is strongly advised.

Access

The venue is wheelchair accessible with an accessible toilet on the ground floor. Please contact us regarding any specific accessibility requirements you may have by emailing events@manlitphil.ac.uk

Buildings in Manchester City Centre – A Guided Walk

Posted on: June 16th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

The walk will encompass the history and character of the 19th century city as seen in its buildings. Professor Asa Briggs famously described Manchester as ‘the Shock City of the Industrial Revolution’. It was the world’s first industrial city. A long-established town, Manchester was the first to embrace both factory-based mass production on a massive scale and the global commerce involved in the importation of raw materials, the production and sale of finished textiles and the multiplicity of associated engineering and chemical industries that went hand in hand. Unfettered by guilds and corporations, Manchester was always ahead of the curve. ‘What Manchester thinks today London thinks tomorrow’ was a famous aphorism highlighting Manchester’s innovation, culture and radicalism that heavily influenced the rest of the country. Wealth derived from manufacturing and commerce spawned civic pride which found expression in mercantile palaces – Manchester’s famous palazzo warehouses – and in equal expressions of civic confidence. These are largely contained in the square mile which is the city’s historic core. The route will cover numerous examples of Manchester’s special building type, the cotton packing warehouse. Their development in terms of layout, construction technology and architectural expression spanning the period 1820 – 1920 will be explained. The walk will also cover commercial and civic buildings within the historic core including works by Charles Barry, Alfred Waterhouse, Basil Champneys, Thomas Worthington, Edward Walters, J E Gregan, Charles Heathcote, Harry S Fairhurst and others. We will see the Town Hall emerging from its scaffolding wrap as the half billion pound restoration nears completion. We will also see the fully restored Albert Memorial which was originally completed ten years ahead of its London namesake.

The walk will cover about one and a half miles. Please be aware that parts of the canal towpath are uneven.

Location

Meet at 10:30am at the Statue of Queen Victoria in Piccadilly Gardens.

Manchester Lit & Phil Literary Book Club

Posted on: May 28th, 2026 by Editor-Jo

Thomas Hardy is unquestionably one of our greatest writers. Though he was a poet principally, today he is more known for his novels: such masterpieces as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge. He’s celebrated for his vivid portrayals of rural life and tragic explorations of fate, class and rigid social norms – the latter of which both got him into trouble and marked him out as ahead of his times.

We’ll be discussing his 1878 novel The Return of the Native – no less of a masterpiece – which opens with a mesmerizingly mythic description of Egdon Heath, thereby setting up the tension with the modernity of the characters and challenging their freedom to shape the world as they wish.

Join us to discuss whether The Return of the Native continues to deserve its place in the hall of literary fame.

The Lit & Phil Literary Book Club is free and exclusively for members, operating on a first come first serve basis, up to a maximum of 15 people.

Save the date and start reading

September 29 book club: All My Sons, Arthur Miller (play).

Book now

Lit & Phil Literary Book Club: Tuesday August 4

Book: The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy

Time: 6.15pm to 7.45pm

Location: Activity Room on the Lower Ground Floor, Manchester Central Library, St Peters Square, City Centre, M2 5PD

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