Double Bill Offer: Book for the Jewish Book Week events in Hall Two tonight – ‘Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters’ at 7pm and ‘Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain our World’ at 8.30pm – to receive a 20% discount. 

Please note, this offer cannot be combined with other Jewish Book Week offers.

Painting in London from WWII to the 1970s is a story of friendships and shared experiences.

Drawing on first-hand interviews, acclaimed art historian Martin Gayford, in conversation with Hannah Rothschild, examines the interwoven lives of artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney, and the teachers and contemporaries, numbering David Bomberg and Jackson Pollock, who influenced them in their quest to explore the boundaries of art, always posting the question, ‘what can painting do?’

Martin Gayford is art critic for the Spectator and author of acclaimed books on Van Gogh, Constable and Micheangelo. Modernists & Mavericks is his latest book.

Hannah Rothschild CBE is an award-winning writer and film director. She became Chair of the National Gallery’s Board of Trustees in 2015 and is a Trustee of Waddesdon Manor.

Evolutions, ‘a breath-taking race through the immense scope of time and space that is our universe,’ brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, our journey from a single cell to the intricate complexities of the human mind.

Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

He is in conversation with Sam Leith.

Oren Harman has a doctorate from Oxford University, is the Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society, and a Professor of the History of Science at Bar Ilan University.

Sam Leith is literary editor at The Spectator, a columnist at The Financial Times, The Evening Standard and Prospect. His work appears in The Guardian, The Times and the TLS among others.