Time: 3 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

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How to depict the impossible, a monster more bizarre than any medieval Apocalypse or engravings of krakens and rhinoceroses? This wretched problem faced artists and writers and alchemists before and after science and skewed the way we saw and dealt with the whale.

In his illustrated lecture, calling witnesses from Albrecht Dürer to Herman Melville, from Albertus Magnus to Marianne Moore, Philip Hoare scans the stormy horizon for fated, star-crossed beasts, elusive mammalian mountains of mystery. He explores the manner of their coming and their demise throughout modern history, how they changed according to what we demanded of them, and how their sacrificial bodies signify art, life, love, and faith in our sublunary times.

Philip Hoare’s new book, Albert and the Whale is published by Pegagus in the USA, and 4th Estate in the UK. It has been acclaimed by the Guardian as ‘his greatest work yet’. His other books include biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, the historical studies, Wilde’s Last Stand, Spike Island, and England’s Lost Eden. His book Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

Viktor Wynd is an artist, author, lecturer, and impresario. He operates The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History as part of The Last Tuesday Society, which hosts London’s longest-running independent literary salon and has hosted over 500 lectures since 2005, from household names to unpublished obsessives.