JEREMY PAXMAN - GREAT BRITAIN AND THE GREAT WAR

Tickets now avail at the venue from 18:30

 

Funds raised will go to the Royal Anglian Regiment Benevolent charity, caring for the needs of soldiers and former soldiers, their dependents, families and the bereaved.

 

Jeremy Paxman will be presenting his own incisive view of Great Britain’s Great War and how it changed us. After the talk, Jeremy will be signing copies of his books which will be on sale. The centenary of the Armistice of World War I is on 11 November 2018. 

 

The war tore this country apart. Cambridge railway station saw crowds of buoyant men from town and gown leave for the Front and it saw the poignant procession of the wounded returning by train. 

 

As sponsor of Jeremy Paxman’s talk, Vanessa Burkitt, Managing Director of Catherine Jones, the Cambridge Jeweller said, ‘Every family in the country was touched by the horrors of the First World War. Communities across the country lost a generation. Our city became the First Great Eastern Hospital. The Leys School, Clare and Trinity Colleges provided space for beds as cloisters and halls became wards providing up to 1,700 beds. The hospital brought people of Cambridge and the University together to care for the wounded and for those who returned after the Armistice with visible or invisible injuries. They came back to a country and a town that was transformed.’

 

This reality, repeated across the country, will be the background and context for Jeremy Paxman’s talk.

 

A lion of British journalism, Jeremy Paxman’s early engagement as a journalist was as Editor of the Cambridge university undergraduate paper while at Saint Catharine’s College. A renowned, award-winning BBC journalist he made his name as a forthright, trenchant interviewer and a courageous documentary maker. 

 

He made his name early covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland. His reports for BBC-TV on Tonight and Panorama led him to become anchorman of the BBC Television’s Newsnight in 1989, a post he held for 25 years. 

 

Jeremy Paxman was known for his forthright and sometimes abrasive interviewing technique on Newsnight, the BBC’s platform for interrogating politicians. While these appearances were sometimes criticised as aggressive, intimidating and condescending, they were also applauded as tough and incisive. Though not of his own fashioning, the question 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?' could well be the guiding principle behind Jeremy Paxman’s interviewing technique. 

 

Cambridge students will have encountered Jeremy in University Challenge which he has chaired since 1994 with his inimitable vigour.

 

Jeremy continues to make documentaries for television including one of the effect of the First World War on Great Britain. He anchored Channel 4’s Election Night coverage in May 2015 and June 2017.  He is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and the author of ten books.   Among other honours, Jeremy Paxman is an honorary fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

 

Vanessa Burkitt added, ‘ We are immensely grateful to Great Saint Mary’s for allowing us to hold the talk in this prestigious and glorious setting and to Michaelhouse Café who are offering a pre-talk supper for £12.’