Children’s fiction has its own peculiar power: like a swordstick in an umbrella, it can flash sharp at unexpected moments. Taken seriously, it can work not just to educate but to transform and liberate, to kick-start the human imagination into life. How does children’s fiction work, and what can it offer us, now?

Katherine Rundell is a fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her novels for children have won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award, among many others. Her books for adults include Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.

Parkinson’s disease turns off certain genes in the cells of the brain. What does it mean for a writer to confront scriptural disintegration and can boxing help rewire the spluttering brain?
 
Anne Carson’s collections of poetry include Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Nox, The Beauty of the Husband, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and, most recently, Wrong Norma. Her many translations of classical works include An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Antigone and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. A new production of her translation of Sophokles’ Elektra, starring Brie Larson, opens at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London two days after the lecture.

On the historical meaning of ‘regime change’ and how far it applies, or doesn’t apply, to the political economy and sociology of the West since 2008.
 

Perry Anderson’s books include Lineages of the Absolutist State, The Origins of Postmodernity, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West. He is a professor of history and sociology at UCLA and sits on the editorial board of New Left Review. He has written more than fifty pieces for the LRB, on subjects including his father’s career in the Chinese Customs Service, Lula’s Brazil, Michael Oakeshott, Anthony Powell, Dmitri Furman, the modern political histories of Italy, Turkey, France and India, and the failings of the EU.