Chris Chibnall – Death at the White Hart
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London) | The Brownsword Hall, Pummery Square, Poundbury, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 3GW, United Kingdom
The villagers of Fleetcombe like to think of it as one of the most picturesque spots in Dorset: two pubs, a small playground, enough gorgeous cottages to keep a thatcher in business. It’s the last place you’d expect a grisly murder. But a body is discovered, tied to a chair in the middle of a nearby road, a stag’s antlers on his head. The victim is soon identified: Jim Tiernan, landlord of the White Hart pub. Detective Nicola Bridge is not short of suspects: in a small village, the pub landlord knows everyone’s business. And beneath the idyllic surface, the residents of Fleetcombe have plenty they want to keep hidden. Someone knows what happened to Jim Tiernan. Someone who drank with him in the busy pub the night he died. Someone who might just be dangerous enough to kill again. As the village’s many dark secrets come to the surface, can Nicola catch the killer before it’s too late?

Chris Chibnall is a BAFTA, Royal Television Society, Broadcasting Press Guild and Peabody award-winning screenwriter, executive producer, and playwright whose work has been seen, translated and remade all around the world. He is the recipient of the prestigious FIPA Prix D’Honneur, and honorary doctorates from Edge Hill University and Sheffield Hallam University. His television work includes Broadchurch,The Great Train Robbery, Doctor Who, Torchwood and Life on Mars.

Chris Chibnall will be in conversation with Roger Metha

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Quentin Letts – Nunc
2025-10-18 11:00 - 12:00
Sunday Times bestselling author Quentin Letts pens a new novel: a modern twist on one of the greatest (yet underlooked) narratives in Christianity: The ‘Nunc Dimittis’, based on ten verses in St Luke’s Gospel. This is the story of Simeon, a man who was told he would not die before he saw the Messiah. He waited at the Temple in Jerusalem until he saw the infant Jesus.

But who was Simeon? Why did he wait? And how did the month-old Jesus escape King Herod’s infamous massacre of the infants?

Nunc! transports you to the Jerusalem of Herod the Great, where Simeon’s old army friend Reuben runs a tea stall selling heavenly honey cakes and fig bread in Deuteronomy Square. When Bildad the beekeeper’s hive goes missing, grocer’s boy Benjamin, owner of a mule and cart that might be a getaway vehicle, is a suspect. The drawlingly subversive Zillah, whose political salon lends her influence, and Simeon’s long-suffering landlady Noor intervene, enduring a power-mad Roman centurion, Lucilius, and the snivelling authoritarian Kedar, the city’s clerk of works. Quentin Letts brings first-century Jerusalem to life and helps an ailing 21st-century Englishman come to terms with his future.

QUENTIN LETTS is political sketch writer for the Daily Mail. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, he was formerly New York correspondent for The Times, gossip columnist for the Daily Telegraph, theatre critic for the Sunday Times and parliamentary sketch writer for The Times. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. His hobbies are gossip, hymn-singing and cricket. He lives in rural Herefordshire.

Quentin Letts will be in conversation with Lulu Taylor.

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Please note that there is an overlap between this event and the following one and you will not be able to attend both.
