SAM QUILL

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Dr. Sam Quill’s

Salon de Conversation

Your time for talk, reading, listening and sustained attention.

‘[Quill is] a scholar of the Romantic poets, who dresses like a Victorian orphan and speaks like a pirate.’
(James Marriott, The Sunday Times)

Sessions can take place in person in London, or online worldwide.

Apéritif (20–30 minutes, online)

A complimentary first conversation, in which we discuss your interests and settle on a topic together.

À la Carte (£90)

One session on a topic of your choice, from the full menu below or the Prix Fixe options. (Treat yourself or give one as a gift.)

Prix Fixe (£250 for 3 sessions)

Choose a theme from the options below and settle in for a few sessions. Or else we can build a bespoke course together.

Imagining England

  1. Arthurian Legend
  2. Shakespeare’s ‘Sceptred Isle’
  3. Ordinary People: George Eliot’s Middlemarch

The Great Philosophers

  1. ‘I Think, Therefore I Am René Descartes’
  2. David Hume and Doubt
  3. Dancing Wittgenstein’s Polka

Hopeful Romantics

  1. Wordsworth’s New Dawn
  2. Byron’s Will to Live
  3. Shelley’s Visions (Poetry and Prophecy)

Table d’Hôte (£50 per head, per hour)

Gather your friends at a table.

A private salon for your own party: pick a theme, set the date, and let us talk. Book a single session or a short course. Less lesson than Enlightenment supper. (Wine optional.)

Le Grand Menu

(£250 for the first three sessions. £85 p/h thereafter. Discount on the total if you book the whole year (52 sessions): £4,420, all at £85 each.)

The full board: this is the special. I will take you through the history of literature, philosophy, theology and politics in these isles, and its international contexts. This is a comprehensive programme of study, designed specifically to tell a story and to build deep knowledge.

I prefer to start at the beginning and work onwards from there. However, I am very happy to begin at any point and to take any selection of topics; my one stipulation is that we discuss them in chronological order.

View the full programme of 52 sessions →

Le Fromage

Intellectual pop.

For those who like their culture with a wink. Past and possible topics include:

  • Madonnas Through Time
  • ABBA and the Ballad Form
  • Britpop and the Problem of ‘America’

(Other topics are available on request)

To Enquire

Write to me at sam@samquill.com to plan your course.

Book

Le Grand Menu

52 sessions, in chronological order

Tap the + beside any session to add it to your selection — build a list, then send it to Sam.

Ancient & Early Britain

Sessions 1–5 · c. 500 BC–500 AD

  1. Whispers of Albion: The earliest mentions of Britain and Ireland, in their mythic contexts. Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul and his trouble with Britons.
  2. Druids, Gymnosophists, Presocratics: and what they can tell us about the ancient spirituality of Europe.
  3. The Roman Conquest: What was it like to be a legionnaire in Britain?
  4. Anti-Roman terrorism: Caratacus, Boudicca and the fight for indigenous freedom.
  5. Apocalypse Then: Britain in the ruins of Rome.

Anglo-Saxon & Medieval England

Sessions 6–13 · c. 500–1500

  1. God and the Norsemen: Early-Christianity and the Vikings in England.
  2. Loneliness in Anglo-Saxon Lyric verse: ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’, ‘Deor’.
  3. Beowulf: The First English Epic
  4. England at last: Alfred the Great, the Somerset Levels and the miraculous birth of a nation.
  5. ‘1066 e Tut Ceo’: The linguistic, cultural and aesthetic significance of the Norman Conquest.
  6. The once and future king: Arthur from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Malory.
  7. ‘Whan that Aprille’: The strange modernity of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
  8. Poets and ‘Makkars’ of poems: Mediaeval verse in the court of the Scottish kings.

Renaissance & Reformation

Sessions 14–18 · c. 1500–1600

  1. The New Learning: Renaissance Humanism, the printing press, and Europe’s rediscovery.
  2. Breaking with Rome: Henry VIII and his part in the beginnings of the English Revolution.
  3. ‘Sweet Thames, Run Softly’: Spenser, Sidney, and the Elizabethan lyric, the invention of English love before Shakespeare.
  4. Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson: dangerous men of the early-modern stage.
  5. Shakespeare: (a full session, with the option to extend over further sessions, as you wish).

The Seventeenth Century

Sessions 19–22 · c. 1600–1700

  1. ‘Though Truth and Falsehood be / Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is’: Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and the Metaphysical Poets; verse, learning to think.
  2. When the world was ending in England: The Civil Wars, regicide, revolution, and radical sects.
  3. Paradise Lost and Leviathan: Milton, Hobbes, and metaphysics of free speech.
  4. What now?: Dryden, Rochester, Aphra Behn, and the scandalous rebirth of English culture in the Restoration.

Enlightenment & Reason

Sessions 23–29 · c. 1660–1800

  1. ‘Cogito ergo sum’: Descartes, Spinoza, and the trial of faith in reason.
  2. English Sense: Bacon, Locke, and the rise of Empiricism; or, why we should look at things.
  3. ‘To Be is to Be Perceived’: Berkeley, Hume and how radical Empiricism is conservative.
  4. Sceptical Reason: Neoclassicism, Alexander Pope and the Augustan Age.
  5. Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’: Gulliver and the anatomy of human folly.
  6. Something Novel: Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and the invention of fiction.
  7. The first Dark Enlightenment: Horace Walpole and the Gothic.

The Romantics

Sessions 30–33 · c. 1790–1830

  1. Sublime Revolution: William Blake as a primer in Romanticism.
  2. ‘Negative Capability’: Keats, his odes, and his failures.
  3. Percy Bysshe Shelley: poetry as prophecy.
  4. ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’: Lord Byron, comic philosopher.

The Victorians

Sessions 34–39 · c. 1830–1900

  1. The novel’s great moment: Dickens, Eliot, and the crises of the nineteenth century.
  2. Lying art: Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and his ‘Sordello’.
  3. Victorian and early-Georgian existentialism: Hardy, Hopkins, and faith.
  4. ‘We all assume that Oscar said it’: Oscar Wilde, wit, beauty, fame, arrogance and suffering.
  5. More than his books: Thomas Hardy’s poetry.
  6. Mill, Marx, and the Great Victorian Arguments: liberty, capital, and the moral imagination of the nineteenth century.

Early Twentieth Century

Sessions 40–47 · c. 1900–1945

  1. ‘In dreams begins responsibility’: W.B. Yeats, Romantic, Modernist, and the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century.
  2. Nietzsche: the death of God, the Übermensch, and the modernist imagination.
  3. Dalloway’s flowers: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, the novel as a thinking thing.
  4. ‘The Men of 1914’: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis; fascism and the avant-garde.
  5. Wittgenstein: from the Tractatus to the Investigations; the duty of genius.
  6. ‘History is a nightmare [...] from which I am trying to awake’: James Joyce, Dublin, and new Word.
  7. Russell, Whitehead, and the Edwardian intellectual revolution: Principia Mathematica, Cambridge, and the new English mind.
  8. Making It New: Modernism, fascism, and democracy — from The Waste Land to the death of the author.

Post-War & Contemporary

Sessions 48–52 · c. 1945–present

  1. ‘What Are Days For?’: Philip Larkin and The Movement; English poetry in recovery.
  2. Existentialism and Absurdism: Sartre, Camus, and the post-war mood.
  3. Theatre after the War: Osborne, Bond, Beckett, and Pinter on the angry, violent, absurd English stage.
  4. Serious poetry in our time: Geoffrey Hill and J. H. Prynne.
  5. ‘Shibboleth’: Heaney, Paterson, Donaghy, and the state of the lyric at the century’s end.

Adult Education

Salon de Conversation

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Bespoke tutorial sessions for adults in literature, philosophy, theology, and history. Take a session yourself, or gather your friends at a table.