Crime Reading Week 2025
Swish will be supporting this year’s Crime Reading Week being held at both Central and Padgate libraries.
Students at the Warrington Academy
Join author and historian Dr. Bill Cooke as he explains the history of the students at the Warrington Academy. It is well known that the Warrington Academy was one of the high points of Warrington’s long history but credit for this is usually given to the men who taught there.…
Three Famous Warringtonians
Join author and historian Dr. Bill Cooke as he explains the history of Warrington’s medieval churchmen. Over the course of Warrington’s long history there are three medieval churchmen who changed the world in ways still felt today. Robert Hallam, Thomas Penketh and Richard Bancroft, all Warrington born and bred, rose…
Papal Elections
Friday 14th March, 7pm for 7:30pm Join author and historian Dr. Stella Fletcher as she explains the history of Papal Elections (Conclaves) When popes exercised political power, their selection process was a matter of intense interest to secular rulers. That political dimension has not survived into the twenty-first century, but the…
2025 Film Nights
7:30pm, Friday, 4th April 2025. Ralph Fiennes leads a top-tier ensemble, including Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini, in an entertainingly juicy adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel
Thelma
Film Night – 7:30pm, Friday, 20th December 2024 93-year-old Thelma Post lives alone in Los Angeles. Her aimless but loving grandson Daniel “Danny” Markowitz often visits and looks after her needs despite not taking responsibility for his own life. Although Thelma is close with Danny, she finds his constant assistance…
The Holdovers
Film Night – 7:30pm, Friday, 29th November 2024 A cantankerous, unpopular teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti); a bright, abrasive student, Angus (Dominic Sessa); and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a recently bereaved mother, find themselves forced to spend the winter holiday together in an otherwise empty…
One Life
Film Night – 7:30pm, Friday, 25th October 2024 Based on the book If It’s Not Impossible…: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton by Barbara Winton, One Life tells the incredible true story of a London stockbroker who helped 669 Jewish children escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the outbreak of World War…
Martin Edwards
Martin Edwards is a crime writer of international distinction, with twenty-three published novels (most recently Hemlock Bay), and two multi-award-winning histories of crime fiction, The Life of Crime and The Golden Age of Murder to his credit. He has received three Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association, including the Dagger…
Venetian Palaces
The city of Venice might appear to be a romantic amalgam of canals and bridges, churches andpalaces, but the trained eye can date the various buildings and thereby discern the rise and fall of aremarkable republic in a Europe of monarchies. This lecture will concentrate on the evolution ofVenice’s secular…