Profile Books

How do we craft identities? Is identity personal? Or are the identities that shape the world, our struggles and our hopes actually social ones, shared with countless others? What roles do family, nationality, culture, class, race and religion play in the shaping of our sense of self? Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges our assumptions about how identity works, weaving personal anecdotes with historical, cultural and literary examples to explore the entanglements within the stories we tell ourselves. He examines how identities are created by conflict, questioning misleading myths and offering a new way for us to think about ourselves and our communities. Louise Erdrich says of Appiah's The Lies That Bind: 'Understanding what draws us together and what tears us apart lies at the core of democracy. This is a vital book, an antidote to violent nativism, and a key to success in the human experiment.' This event is an opportunity to listen as Appiah - in the words of Zadie Smith - 'dismantles the humbug, dogma, pseudo-science and propaganda that have long dogged our attempts to discuss "identity" and offers in their place a practical and philosophical tool kit, as subtly radical in its aims as it is humane in application.'

Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today. The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly. Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.

Join us to debate the science of identity with some of the world's greatest thinkers in genetics and philosophy. Award-winning Harvard geneticist David Reich, Reith lecturer and NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah and chair Adam Rutherford, scientist, broadcaster and author of The Book of Humans, will discuss how a scientific revolution that exposes the real history of our DNA offers us new - often startling - answers to a perennial question: who are we? Recent discoveries such as Britain's 10,000 year-old blue-eyed, dark-skinned Cheddar Man show us that studying ancient DNA can unlock the secret, surprising history of our species. As these revelations upend common ideas about what our ancestors looked like, and geneticists continue to demonstrate that "race" functions as a social rather than scientific concept, to what extent do we see our heritage, history and culture as being central to our identity today? And as nationalist political narratives reverberate around the world, what role can science communicators play in halting dangerous assumptions about how we define ourselves and others? There will be a book signing after the event. Further speakers to be announced.