Kassia St Clair

Is there any person, or perhaps several people, who will accept the challenge of travelling from Paris to Peking this summer by automobile?’ This question, posed in a Parisian newspaper in January 1907, kick-started the incredible and improbable true story of the Peking to Paris race. Join Kassia St Clair, cultural historian and the author of The Secret Lives of Colour, for a talk about her latest book and BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, The Race to the Future. As well as following an unlikely cast of characters - an Italian prince, two plucky journalists and a conman - through deserts, over mountain passes and across rivers in early, crank-started machines, the talk will explore what this race tells us about a world teetering on the brink of modernity.