Edmund Griffiths — talks
Talks for the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society—all subjects (politics, literature, belief systems, philosophy, folklore, history, history of science, Marxist theory, etc., etc.). Most were given live, although a few started out as audio recordings (e.g. during the pandemic).
Mirsayet Soltanghaliev (1892–1940) and the anti-colonial revolution
19 June 2025
Soltanghaliev’s name may also be encountered in spellings such as Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, Mirsәjet Soltanƣәlijef, etc.; I do not claim that the one I have used in my title is the best. The Morning Star, which printed an article of mine very loosely based on this talk, unfortunately fluctuated between ‘Soltanghaliev’ and ‘Sultan-Galiev’.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mirsaid-sultan-galiev-forgotten-forerunner-third-worldist-leftism
Who built the pyramids? The appeal of alternative historiography
19 August 2021
Anatomy of the classic ghost story
31 October 2024
Image: on the way to the venue to give this talk
The Trotskyist stars: J. Posadas and saviours from on high
14 September 2023
Valerian Pereverzev (1882–1968) and ‘eidological poetics’
20 January 2022
Shock horror: the Milgram experiment
13 February 2025
Thomas Hobbes and geometry
16 July 2026
Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) and God-building
30 March 2023
The book by Lunacharsky that I discuss in this talk is actually entitled Religion and Socialism, not the other way round. Pitfall of doing these without notes.
Wonders of the visible world: the politics of the Salem witch trials
5 May 2022
Image: Tompkins Harrison Matteson, The Trial of George Jacobs, August 5th, 1692 (detail) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matteson_Trial_of_George_Jacobs.jpg
15-minute cities: where East Berlin meets The Hunger Games?
6 June 2024
Caption to go with the image:
Dave wasn’t actually wild about the idea of eating an insect, but it was important to show he didn’t buy into the conspiracy theories.
Symbolism in the folklore of the summer solstice
18 June 2026
Image: detail of a photograph by Kora27 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mittsommerfest_in_Norwegen,_Insel_Tysnes_IMG_4425WI.jpg
Come, thou long-expected Jesus: the Left Behind novels
17 December 2020
Image: John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath (detail) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Martin_-_The_Great_Day_of_His_Wrath_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
That night in which all horses are white, part 1: Confucius
16 February 2023
This is notionally the first part in a series on ancient Chinese philosophy, but I haven’t yet got around to doing any more parts. Image by Zai Ying https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:驍騰萬里，載瀛.jpg
How to program in Refal (and other arts of the Brezhnev era)
2 April 2026
The handout (a sample Refal program) can be found here:
https://pastebin.com/gZuakiQQ
(The talk is unlikely to be very easy to follow without it.)
But I’m afraid the line numbers you’ll see there don’t match the ones I mention in the talk: my original printed handout only numbered the non-blank lines (as is usual in line-numbered texts of poems, etc.), but not everyone follows that convention.
A fiction: longtermism
5 May 2023
The hostile stars: H. P. Lovecraft and the anti-human universe
13 July 2023
The Tory component of British socialism
4 April 2024
Mysteries of the deep: the Flying Dutchman
13 August 2020
Image: The Flying Dutchman (detail), by Charles Temple Dix. In the talk I mention a handout with a sketch map—that isn't included here, but any map of South Africa showing Table Bay and Cape Agulhas will do just as well (if you want to remind yourself where those places are). N.B. The colony of Dutch Ceylon in fact fell to the British in 1796, not 1795 as I say here.
Early light at Piltdown: the discovery of Eoanthropus dawsoni
18 December 2025
Image: Piltdown Man and Hippopotamus (1948), by the Soviet painter and palaeontologist Konstantin Flerov https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Piltdown_Man_hunting_on_the_hippopotamus_by_Flerov.jpg
