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Morero, who has been awarded funding for the study of the medieval Islamic rock<br />
crystal industry, and who as a result was the first person since the eleventh century<br />
to handle all the surviving rock crystal ewers, known as the Magnificent Seven,<br />
made for the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo around the year 1,000.<br />
We held many events in our now one-year-old, much admired and much used,<br />
Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, one of the most keenly attended of which was Sir<br />
Tony Epstein’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Epstein-<br />
Barr virus, on 24 February <strong>2014</strong>. We enjoyed a remarkable appearance by the<br />
Nobel Prize-winning novelist J M Coetzee, masterminded by Elleke Boehmer. We<br />
were given a fascinating London Lecture on migration by Hein de Haas. We ran<br />
a Wolfson Lecture series on South Asian fiction-writing, for which our speakers<br />
were Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, and Anita and Kiran<br />
Desai. Other major events this year have included the Syme Lecture by Walter<br />
Scheidel on ‘The First Fall of the Roman Empire’ and Steven Pinker’s Haldane<br />
Lecture on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.<br />
Professor Steven Pinker and the President at the Haldane Lecture<br />
21
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