The Arts Society Tours with Fred. Olsen

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.

Elaine Hansen has a Master’s degree in Education and taught for twenty-seven years. She now splits her year between Italy and Scotland. After retiring twelve years ago she studied Art History at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. She became a guide at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow in 2009. In Italy Elaine researches her Italian lectures and in Glasgow attends seminars relating to her areas of interest in Scottish Art. She has been delivering lectures for the last five years in a number of venues both in Scotland and Italy, many of which have requested return visits. In May 2018 she became an accredited lecturer for the Arts Society, UK.

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.

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.