Join alumni in the contemporary tapestry studios at Dovecote for an evening of discussion, networking and refreshments.

The evening will be led by a talk by Professor Archie Brown on, ‘What’s so great about a strong leader?’ There is widespread agreement that to have a strong leader is a ‘good thing’. Focusing especially on the UK and USA, and with a brief look at authoritarian regimes, Professor Brown will question the notion that strong, power-maximising leaders should be regarded as either the most successful or the most praiseworthy.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A and the opportunity to purchase signed copies of his book The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age, which was named by Bill Gates as one of the four best books he read in 2016.​

Speaker: Archie Brown, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford

A Fellow of the British Academy since 1991, Professor Brown was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Two of Archie Brown’s earlier books, The Gorbachev Factor and The Rise and Fall of Communism, won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for best politics book of the year. A Scot, who was born and brought up in Annan, Professor Brown has lived in Oxford for the past forty-six years, punctuated by Visiting Professorships at Yale, Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Notre Dame as well as numerous study and lecturing visits to Russia, China and many other countries.