What is Jeremy Bentham’s corpse doing in UCL's South Cloisters? Did he provide the financial backing for the foundation of UCL? Was he a professor in the Department of Laws? Does his ghost trundle around UCL at night? Does he attend Council meetings, and is he recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’?

As for the corpus, this consists of 60,000 folios of manuscripts deposited in the UCL Library. For 50 years the Bentham Committee has been overseeing the editing and publication of a new edition of Bentham’s works. How is this extraordinarily large collection still relevant today? This lecture marks the anniversary of UCL’s foundation on 11 Feb 1826