Literary And Musical Salon

Robert Burns – Joseph Haydn “Scottish Airs” + works by Mozart and Beethoven

October 2022

P.B.Shelley “The Sunset” – O. Respighi “Il Tramonto” + Edward Elgar: musical pieces for violin and piano

April 2023

Sir Walter Scott “Lady of the Lake” + works by Franz Schubert & Edward Elgar

September 2023

Oskar Schindler + Steven Spielberg’s Film „Schindler’s List“ & Soundtrack by John Williams

March 2024

6 o’clock Tea LITERARY WORKSHOPS

TOPICS

DATES

„The 1920s in England: Bloomsbury’s Views on Art and Life”: Virginia Woolf + Vita Sackville-West

April 1994

California: T.C.Boyle “Tortilla Curtain” + John Steinbeck “Cannery Row”

December 1998

Susan Sontag “The Volcano Lover”

January 1999

Tobias Wolff “The Night in Question”

February 1999

Magdalene Nabb “The Monster of Florence”

March 2000

Asian Women Writers’ Workshop “Right of Way”

March 2001

Agatha Christie & the Orient: “Mallowan. Come, Tell Me How You Live. An Archaeological Memoir”

April 2001

Rose Tremain “Evangelista’s Fan”

May 2001

Bahiyyiih Nakhjavani “The Saddlebag”

June 2001

Tony Kushner “Angels in America“

September 2001

Aboriginal Art + Sally Morgan “My Place”

October 2001

Ireland: Anne Devlin “After Easter” + John B. Keane “Short Stories”

December 2001

“Canadian Stories”: Leonard Cohen + Sharon Butala

January 2002

Joyce Carol Oats “Blond”

February 2002

Andrew Miller “Ingenious Pain”

April 2002

Tracy Chevalier “Girl with a Pearl Earring”

May 2002

Joanne Harris  “Five Quarters of the Orange” + “Blackberry Wine”

October 2002

Sally Vickers “Miss Garnet’s Angel”

November 2002

Vienna 1900: Gustav Klimt + Frederic Morton “Forever Street” + “Thunder at Twilight. Vienna 1913/14”

January 2003

Amitav Gosh “The Glass Palace”

February 2003

Paul Bowles “The Sheltering Sky”

April 2003

Clare Boothe Luce “The Women”

June 2003

J. Sobol, “Alma” – Alma Mahler-Werfel

November 2003

„Crucifixes, Mountains, Flowers & Poetry“: William Blake & D.H.Lawrence

December 2003

South Africa: Pamela Gien “The Syringa Tree”

February 2004

Richard Harris “Pompeii”

March 2004

R. Kipling “Just So Stories”

April 2004

Elizabeth George “Well-Schooled in Murder” + “Deception on his Mind”

May 2004

Samuel Pepys “Diaries”

September 2004

Monica Ali “Brick Lane”

September 2004

Geoffrey Chaucer “The Canterbury Tales”

October 2004

Tobias Jones “The Dark Heart of Italy”

November 2004

Jane Austen “Pride & Prejudice” + Karen Jay Fowler „The Jane Austen Book Club”

November 2005

Marina Lewicka “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”

December 2005

Janie Bolitho “The Cornish Novels. A Rose Trevelyan Trilogy”

January 2006

Graham Greene “The Constant Gardener”

March 2006

Elizabeth Kostova “The Historian”

May 2006

Dan Brown “The Da Vinci Code”

June 2006

C.S.Lewis “The Chronicles of Narnia”

June 2006

Virginia Woolf “Mrs. Dalloway”

November 2006

William Somerset Maugham “Collected Short Stories”

December 2006

Joan Marble “Notes from a Roman Terrace”

January 2007

E.M.Foster “Where Angels Fear to Tread”

February 2007

“Under Vesuvius. Art & Artists in & around Naples 17th – 19th Century”: Susan Sontag, “The Volcano Lover” + “The Grand Tour”

March 2007

Washington Irving “Tales of the Alhambra”

April 2007

Antonia Fraser “Marie Antoinette”

May 2007

Tennessee Williams “The Rose Tattoo”

June 2007

Michael Grant “Cleopatra”

October 2007

“The Sea in Literature”: Ernest Hemingway “The Old Man And the Sea”, John Banville “The Sea”, Herman Melville “Moby Dick” + film “1900”

November 2007

“The Tale of Beatrix Potter” + “The Tale of Peter Rabbit & Other Stories” + “Beatrix Potter And the Lake District”

January 2008

Artemisia Gentileschi: Mary Gerrard “The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art” + Susan Vreeland “The Passion of Artemisia”

March 2008

James Joyce “Triestine Itineraries” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” + “Ulysses”

April 2008

Salman Rushdie “The Enchantress of Florence”

June 2008

Deborah Moggach “These Foolish Things”

October 2008

Alison Weir “ Henry VIII”

September 2008

Willy Russell “Educating Rita”

September 2008

Sue Townsend “The Queen And I” + “Queen Camilla”

November 2008

Marina Lewycka “Two Caravans”

January 2009

Amanda Foreman “Georgiana. Duchess of Devonshire”

April 2009

Robert Harris “Marcus Tullius Cicero IMPERIUM”

May 2009

Nick Hornby “An Education”

May 2009

Willy Russell “Shirley Valentine”

June 2009

Jed Rubenfeld “Interpretation of Murder“ – S. Freud in America

June 2009

Amitav Gosh “Sea of Poppies”

November 2009

Louise Erdrich “The Master Butchers Singing Club”

January 2010

Barbara Quick “Vivaldi’s Virgins”

March 2010

Maggie O’Farrell “The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox”

April 2010

Harriet O’Brien “Queen Emma & the Vikings”

June 2010

The Pre-Raphaelites & Poetry

October 2010

“The British & the South Seas” Robert Louise Stevenson + Somerset Maugham

November 2010

English Writers & Venice: William Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, John Ruskin,…

December 2010

Christopher Hampton “The Talking Cure”

January 2011

“English Language Writers on the Cote d’Azur”: F. Scott Fitzgerald “Tender is the Night” + Graham Greene “Loser Takes it All”

February 2011

Charlotte Bronte “Jane Eyre”

March 2011

W. Somerset Maugham “The Painted Vail”

April 2011

Alan Bennett “The Clothes They Stood Up In” + British TV series “Keeping Up Appearances”

June 2011

Toni Morrison “Desdemona” + “A Mercy”

September 2011

Edmund de Waal “The Hare with Amber Eyes”

November 2011

Andrew Graham-Dixon “Caravaggio”

January 2012

Simon Stephens “Wastewater”

January 2012

Elizabeth Bowen “A Time in Rome”

February 2012

Richard Ford “Rock Springs”

February 2012

Deborah Moggach “These Foolish Things”

March 2012

Frederic Morton “The Rothschilds”

May 2012

“London & Dickens”: Charles Dickens “The Uncommercial Traveller” + “Dickens’ Victorian London 1839-1901”

June 2012

Carl E. Schorske “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna”

June 2012

Salley Vickers “Aphrodite’s Hat. Short Stories”

September 2012

Alice Munro “Short Stories. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”

November 2012

Glynis Ridley “The Discovery of Jeanne Baret”

January 2013

Art Forgery: Noah Charney “The Art Thief” + Patricia Highsmith ”Ripley Under Ground”

February 2013

Eric R. Kandel “The Age of Insight”

March 2013

F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”

May 2013

Paul Roberts “Life And Death in Pompeii And Herculaneum”

October 2013

Giles Tremlett “Catherine of Aragon”

November 2013

Ruth Lewin Sime “Lise Meitner” + Carl Djerassi “How I Beat Coca-Cola And Other Tales of One-Upmanship”

December 2013

Peter May “The Lewis Trilogy”

March 2014

Shirley McKay “Hew Cullan Mysteries”

April 2014

Frank Tallis “Death And the Maiden” + William Boyd “Waiting for Sunrise”

May 2014

Alison Weir “The Captive Queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine”

September 2014

Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh “The Flesh” + “Fleshmarket Close” + “Set in Darkness”

November 2014

Therese Anne Fowler “Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” + Elisabeth de Waal “The Exiles Return”

December 2014

David Abulafia “The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean” + Michael Pye “The Edge of the World. How the North Sea Made Us Who We are”

February 2015

Chimanda Ngozi Adichie “Americanah” + Dinaw Mengistu “Children of the Revolution”

May 2015

Peter Ackroyd “Thames. Sacred River”

June 2015

“The Bloomsbury Group”: Virginia – Vanessa – Vita

September 2015

Deborah Soloman “Utopia Parkway. The Life & Work of Joseph Cornell”

October 2015

“Fin-de-Siècle Espionage”: Robert Harris “An Officer And A Spy” + John Osborne “A Patriot for Me”

December 2015

“Cathedral Builders”: Jean Gimpel “Cathedral Builders” + Ken Follet “The Pillars of the Earth”

February 2016

Gita May “Elisabeth Vigée le Brun”

March 2016

Billie Holiday “The Lady Sings the Blues”

May 2016

Jane Gardam “Old Filth” + “The Man in the Wooden Hat” + “Last Friends”

June 2016

“Swinging London”: Nick Hornby “Funny Girl” + Sadie Jones “Fallout”

September 2016

Sarah Gristwood “ The Story of Beatrix Potter”

November 2016

Susan Vreeland “Clara & Mr. Tiffany”

December 2016

William Shakespeare: James Shapiro “1606. Shakespeare and the Year of Lear” + Janette Winterson “The Gap of Time” + Howard Jacobson “Shylock is my Name”

January 2017

Margot Lee Shatterly “Hidden Figures”

February 2017

Burma (Myanmar): George Orwell “Burmese Days” + film “The Lady”

March 2017

Jhumpa Lahiri “The Interpreter of Maladies”

April 2017

George Clare “Last Waltz in Vienna”

May 2017

“The Bronte Sisters – To Walk Invisible”: Anne Bronte “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”

October 2017

Mark Lamster “Master of Shadows. Peter Paul Rubens”

October 2017

Jean Rhys “Wide Sargasso Sea”

November 2017

Graham Swift “Mothering Sunday” + film “Gosford Park” by Robert Altman

December 2017

Canada: Leonard Cohen “The Favourite Game” + Margaret Atwood “Stone Mattress”

March 2018

Arundhati Roy “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”

April 2018

Zadie Smith “Swing Time”

May 2018

Alexander Hardcastle & the Greek Temples of Agrigento”: Alexandra Richardson “Passionate Patron. The Life of Alexander Hardcastle”

October 2018

Marina Lewycka “We Are Alle Made of Glue” + Johnny Cash Lyrics

November 2018

Corrie ten Boon & J. E. Sherill “The Hiding Place” + J. North Conway “Queen of Thieves. The True Story of Marm Mandelbaum & her Gangs of New York”

January 2019

James Baldwin “If Beale Street Could Talk”

February 2019

Natasha Pulley “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street”

March 2019

Bernard Cornwell “Fools And Mortals”

May 2019

Robert Harris “Munich”

June 2019

“Poetry Picknick”: W.B. Yeates, D.H.Lawrence, Anne Ridler, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, William Blake

September 2019

Natasha Solomons “Mr. Rosenblum’s List”

October 2019

Nancy Mitford “The Persuit of Love” + Julian Mitchell “Another Country”

November 2019

Kathrine Mansfield “Short Stories”

February 2020

Louisa May Alcott “Little Women” + Wini Moranville “The Little Women Cookbook”

February 2020

V.S.Naipaul “Miguel Street” + Alexander McCall Smith “The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”

March 2020

Tennessee Williams “Suddenly Last Summer”

June 2020

Graham Greene “Travels with my Aunt” + “The Quiet American”

July 2020

Gertrud Bell “The Desert and the Sown” + W. S. Maugham “The

Gentleman in the Parlour”

August 2020

DYSTOPIAS: Aldous Huxley “Brave New World” + George Orwell “Nineteen Eighty-Four” + William Golding “Lord of the Flies”

September 2020

Adrian Goldsworthy “Hadrian’s Wall” + “Antony & Cleopatra”

October 2020

Stephen Fry “Mythos. The Greek Myths Retold” + The British Museum “Troy. Myth & Reality”

May 2021

“The Long 1950s”: Endeavour Morse + film “Summer of Rockets”

September 2021

“Mysteries of English Society, 2nd Half of the 20th Century:  ”Barbara Pym “Excellent Women” + Caroline Graham “Midsomer Murder Mysteries”

November 2021

“English Women as Collectors and Scientific Pioneers, 19th Century”: Tracy Chevalier “Remarkable Creatures” + John Fowles “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”

December 2021

“Mr. Loverman”, by Bernardine Evaristo + Film “Beginners” with Christopher PlummerApril 2022
“The Lady Cornaro” by Jane Howard Guernsey + “Shakespeare in Venice”, “In Venice with Henry James”, “Venice. A Maritime Republic” by Frederic C. LaneMay 2022
New Commonwealth Literarture: “The Good Doctor”, by Damon Galgut + “Desertion”, by Abdulrazak GurnahJune 2022
“The Fable of the Bees”, Bernard Mandeville, 1732 + “The Magician of Lublin”, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1960September 2022
“Black Faces, White Faces” & “God on the Rocks”, Jane Gardam + “The Double Comfort Safari Club”, Alexander McCall SmithOctober 2022
“Mortal Mischief” & TV series “Vienna Blood” by Frank Tallis + “Hamnet” by Maggie O’FarrellNovember 2022
Swinging London: “Utopia Avenue” by David Mitchell + Film “Blow-Up” by Michelangelo AntonioniFebruary 2023
“The Miniaturist” by Jessie BurtonMarch 2023
“The Island” by Victoria Hislop + “In the Time of the Butterflies” by Julia AlvarezMay 2023

“Tales from Shakespeare” by Charles and Mary Lamb + Film “Romeo & Juliet” by Franco Zeffirelli

October 2023

“Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood + Film “Cabaret” + “The Marriage Portrait” by Maggie O’Farrell

November 2023

“The Scapegoat” by Daphne du Maurier + “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie + Film “And Then There Were None”

January 2024

“The Bookshop” by Penelope Fitzgerald + Film + “The Gustav Sonata” by Rose Tremain + “A Single Thread” by Tracy Chevalier

February 2024