Location: BSECS 2023, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

This was a workshop rather than a presentation, which I pitched as follows:

Learn to play basset, ombre, and other such games, and try your luck against the bank in a laid-back setting. In so doing, I hope we’ll learn something about eighteenth-century sociability, the antics that led to government clampdowns on gambling, and those works of literature, from Pope to Austen, that feature flimsy – but very meaningful – bits of paper.