6 June at 11.30am
Lecture on the male nude

6 June at 10am
Poetry lecture on Sappho

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Fiercely intellectual, quixotic and often outrageous, academic Germaine Greer is in a class of her own. Born in Melbourne in 1939 and educated at a convent school, she came to England in the 1960s to do a PhD. She promptly embraced the counter-culture, contributing to Oz magazine before its obscenity trial. In 1970 she published her famous book, The Female Eunuch, which analysed women's oppression and called for them to break out of their accepted female roles.

Greer has been throwing cats among intellectual pigeons ever since. Notable stirs were caused by her 1996 book, Women, Sex and Desire, which some took as an attack on heterosexual sex, and her recent book, The Boy, a celebration of young male beauty.

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Germaine Greer