Gibraltar Literary Festival 2022

In 1655, a new Pope, Alexander VII, fired with religious zeal, political guile, and a mania for building, determined to restore the prestige of his Church by making Rome the must-visit destination for Europe’s elite. To help him do so he enlisted the talents of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, already celebrated as the most important artist of the age.

Together Alexander VII and Bernini made one of the great double acts in history, inventing the concept of soft power and the bucket list destination. Bernini and Alexander’s creation of Baroque Rome, a city grander and more beautiful than since the days of the Emperor Augustus, continues to delight and attract.

Loyd Grossman’s love of Rome was kindled by his first encounter with the enigmatic monument to this relationship between artist and pope: the elephant carrying an obelisk outside the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, just behind the Pantheon. Using the elephant as his starting point, Grossman teases out all the intertwined strands of history, power and art that make up the Baroque.

Professor Catherine Green is one of the leading members of the vaccine team that developed and tested the successful Oxford Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

On 1st January 2020, Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever seen before. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from COVID-19

Green, co-author with Gilbert of Covid-19 & Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, reveals the inside story of making the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and the cutting-edge science and sheer hard work behind it.

This is their story of fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Green will share the heart-stopping moments in the eye of the storm, separate fact from fiction, and explain how they made a safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching.

Vaxxers invites us into the lab to find out how science will save us from this pandemic, and how we can prepare for the inevitable next one.

Green heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility. She is the Monsanto Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford

and an associate professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford. This is the story of a race—not against other vaccines or other scientists, but against a deadly and devastating virus.

Green talks to Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

This is a book about the highest levels of presence and peak performance leadership, and the cultures that ensue from them, in which well-being, results and contribution to the world are naturally interwoven.

It is above all a call to break from the chronically imbalanced ways of thinking and functioning that have become the norm in so many corporate cultures, where doing eclipses being, and hyper-rational, analytical thinking relegates feeling, sensing, intuiting and the transpersonal to the outer fringes of life.

I believe that the failure to correct this imbalance is severely detrimental not only to individual and organizational performance, but to our capacity for creating healthy, thriving futures.

In the book I outline a theoretical and practical path to a new paradigm of leadership. It is a path of restoration, through which we reintegrate previously exiled aspects of our nature: physical, emotional and transpersonal. On this pathway, the brilliance and sophistication of the thinking self takes its rightful place alongside the sensing and feeling selves, together creating a much larger, more holistic intelligence.

To face the scope and threats of 21^st-century challenges, today’s leaders must possess potent powers for logic, reason, discernment and strategic forecasting. Yet, they must also be empathic and therefore embodied; grounded and therefore intuitive. They must be skilled in mindfulness and deep listening; present and receptive to higher levels of insight and innovation; able to inspire authentic engagement and collaboration; and possess a clear and wholehearted sense of service, mission and purpose.