The Arts Society Tours with Fred. Olsen

Dr Patricia Andrew FSA AMA has degrees in English Literature from Nottingham and History of Art from Edinburgh. She has been a curator of museums and galleries in Eastbourne, Chelmsford and Durham, and has also served as Deputy Director of the Scottish Museums Council. She has lectured for the University of Edinburgh, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 2017.

She lectures to a wide range of organisations including the National Galleries of Scotland and their Friends. As a cruise-ship lecturer, she has specialised in the Baltic and the Mediterranean, and has visited Norway many times. Patricia’s research centres on British art and artists, at home and abroad, from around 1700.  Her book, A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artists in the Twentieth Century, won the Saltire Society’s award for the best history book in Scotland 2015. For the 2022 cruise to Norway, Patricia will be lecturing on Norway in art, past and present, and The man behind ‘The Scream’: Edvard Munch’s life and work.

Michelle is a Professor Emeritus at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Visiting Professor at University College London. She was formerly the Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, a Visiting Professor at Leeds and Baylor Universities and a Senior Research Fellow of Oslo University.

One of her specialist areas of study is the early cultural history of Britain and Ireland and she is considered a world expert on manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. A specialist in History, Art History and Archaeology, she brings these skills to bear upon the art, buildings and artefacts of an age to give insight into the lives of those who made and used them.

She has lectured, published and broadcast widely (including Time Team, In our Time, The Beauty of Books, Heavenly Gardens, Chrisitianity: a History). Her books include: How Christianity Came to Britain and Ireland, The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World and Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture c.450-1050.

Julia has loved looking at art since discovering the work of Gustav Klimt while teaching English in Austria as part of her German degree course at the University of Durham.  She spent the first part of her career teaching German, then did a Master’s in Teaching English at the University of Manchester, and went on to teach international students in the city. She became a tour guide at Manchester Art Gallery and knew at once that this was what she really wanted to do, spending every spare moment learning about art history.  She eventually left language teaching in 2018 and since then has loved spending all her time sharing her passion for art as a speaker to many different groups.  She became an Accredited Lecturer of the Arts Society in 2020, specialising in Scottish art from 1880 and the art of Manchester.  She and her astronomer husband love to travel around Europe and take every opportunity to visit art galleries wherever they go, but Scotland has always been their favourite destination!

John graduated in Classical subjects at Cambridge University and taught Latin and Greek language and Ancient History – now revamped as Classical Civilization - for over thirty years at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, where he was Senior Master. His main academic interests are in Roman imperial history and the architecture of religious buildings.

Accompanied by his wife, Karen, John worked for several years teaching English for the British Council in Iran and Turkey, which gave him a now long-standing interest in Islamic culture as well as the ancient civilizations of these two countries. He and Karen have led a number of highly successful tours to Turkey and Iran in recent years and took a group to Georgia in 2014.

Since 2005 he has lectured regularly for The Arts Society, formerly NADFAS  (the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies) in the UK and abroad, including Australia and New Zealand. He has run courses on Ancient Rome and on Islam at the University of Bath, runs an annual course on Mediaeval Parish Churches at Marlborough College Summer School and guides at Salisbury Cathedral.

John has lectured on Mediterranean cruises and on classical tours to Italy, Greece and Tunisia, and having developed a great enthusiasm for SE Europe has been leading specialist tours to Romania, Croatia and (especially) Bulgaria for many years. He runs his own cultural and historical tours there and has taught himself passable Bulgarian.

Alice has lectured for the University of Oxford for over 20 years. Her busy free lance career includes tutor-guiding study groups to Europe, lecturing for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and writing and running history of art courses for the Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock. She runs independent classes in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire. Alice has been a guest lecturer at New College, Oxford, and at the University of Bristol.
She is President of Banbury Fine Arts Society and President of The Arts Society Northleach ~ a role she was proud to accept. She has been an accredited lecturer with The Arts Society since 2004 and has lectured all over the UK and in Europe. Alice regards her Arts Society work as highly stimulating and has enjoyed meeting people from many walks of life.
Her first lectures with Fred Olsen were in 2019, travelling to the Middle East, which was exciting and very rewarding.

Martin is an independent Art Historian and has been an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society since 2013. He also speaks to other societies and groups throughout the country, including the National Trust. His subjects range from the Bayeux Tapestry to Brutalist Architecture via the ‘Can Can’ and Paris in the era of Impressionism. His main specialism, however, is French and British 18^th and 19^th century art and garden history.

Before concentrating on lecturing and research Martin’s working life was initially in fine art publishing and later information technology. He has travelled extensively, having lived and worked in Belgium and the United States for several years. In recent years he has undertaken lecture tours of both Australia and New Zealand.

Ray has been an accredited lecturer with The Arts Society since 2016. He lectures on a range topics including painters such as John Constable, JMW Turner, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; and sculptors including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Germaine Richier. Ray’s more contemporary lectures look at Pop Art and Conceptual Art.

He gained a MA in the History of Art in 2017 from the University of Buckingham. (His first degrees in the early 1970s were in economics!) He was been a guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern since 2011. For most of Ray’s working life, he worked in health and social care as a policy maker, planner and researcher. But now his sole focus is the celebration, and communication, of art in all its many forms.