world. A different theme is discussed each year, to the accompaniment of remarkable meals from different countries, and with the proceedings amusingly spiced by the contrasting personalities of Zeldin and Davidson as joint chairmen. In the first thirty years, thirty volumes were published containing the essays contributed by participants. Zeldin took his interest in experimental innovation further by starting a restaurant inside his college, run by a cordon bleu chef, to compete against the college's own more conventional food, and to attract fresh ideas from diners from outside the college. He emphasises that the taste of food is only one part of gastronomy, quoting Brillat-Savarin who exalted not only the art of the kitchen but also the art of the table and the conversation and conviviality it encouraged. The Oxford Muse Foundation The Oxford Muse Foundation was established in 2001 to pursue the practical implications of Zeldin's thinking. Its ambition 'to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life' is implemented in three ways. In personal life, it has responded to the superficiality of social intercourse by organising one-to-one conversations between people who do not know one another; and it helps individuals to create sophisticated self-portraits (in prose or in film) to say what they would like others to understand about them, replacing the boasts of curricula vitae with more deeply considered reflections on character, opinions and ambitions. In professional life, it investigates how different forms of work can be reconceived to fulfil the expanding aspirations of a new generation, and it designs small-scale experiments to test how particular industries can look beyond the traditional assumptions of business practice so as to diminish the frustrations and boredom of employment. In cultural life, its goal is to create a new level of postgraduate education that, instead of teaching how to become a narrow specialist, is an introduction to the ways of thinking of people in the many different branches of science, commerce, public service, spirituality and the arts, how they approach problems, how they view the world and what unresolved problems they face, in every civilisation. Muse Conversations have taken place in twelve countries with participants from every social category, from the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Olympic Games, multinational corporations and public officials to universities, doctors’ patients and shelters for homeless people. Guide to an Unknown City (2004) contains the self-portraits of a wide variety of Oxford