WHAT'S ON
Full List
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Culture | Thurs 11th Dec | 7:00-8:30 pm
Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.
'Why aren't all novels like this?' - THE CRITIC
What's left when the kids grow up and leave home? When Tom Layward's wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while taking her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact, and keeps driving West. An unforgettable road trip novel, The Rest of Our Lives beautifully explores the nuance and complications of a long term marriage. A mix of funny, poignant and thought-provoking.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Markovits is a British-American author and grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics and write novels. He has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories and reviews for The New York Times, Esquire, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review and others. He has published several novels meanwhile winning prizes and accolades such as the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize for short story. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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ADDITIONAL INFO
ACCESS
Bar open with snacks
Gong Bath
Wellbeing / Thurs 11th Dec/ 7-8.30 pm
Come recharge your batteries with a truly revitalising gong session. This gong therapy will renew your energy and calm your mind as the resonating sounds of different gongs wash over you.
You need to bring your own equipment (mat & blanket) or you can rent it from us for 8€ (see in the registration form).
Gabriela Garcia Toledo has dedicated herself to personal and holistic development since 2005 when a life-altering brain injury prompted to reevaluate her path. Leaving a career in EU affairs, she embraced a new path by becoming a certified yoga instructor for children and adults, and developed a deep proficiency in gong therapy, driven by her belief in the restorative power of sound. Her vision is that sound therapy will offer innovative insights to healthcare, providing safe and effective solutions for a wide range of conditions without adverse effects.
Claudio Salinas is a dedicated practitioner and teacher of sound and frequency therapy. Based in Brussels, he is originally from Argentina. His journey as a seeker has led him to specialize in tools like gongs, singing bowls, and tuning forks, aiding individuals in their personal transformation journeys. Claudio has trained intensively with renowned masters in the field of gong and sound therapy, gaining a wealth of knowledge and experience. In recent years, he has broadened his practice to include vocal techniques and a deep understanding of frequency, using the power of voice to release blockages and facilitate self-expression as well as addressing in particular issues related to stress and burnout.
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Epidemiology and Conflict Sandra Melone & Xavier de Radiguès
Epidemiology and Conflict
Sandra Melone & Xavier de Radiguès
Conversations | Sat 13th Dec | 5-7pm
What can epidemiology tell us about war? And how can it help build peace? Join us for an eye-opening conversation on the powerful role of epidemiology in conflict zones - one that helps reveal the hidden toll of war, predict emerging crises, and shape life-saving responses.
Together with Sandra Melone and epidemiologist Xavier de Radiguès, we'll explore how epidemiologists measure the real impacts of conflict - excess mortality, famine, massive population displacement and outbreaks - and how this knowledge guides humanitarian action and global advocacy.
Our co-host, Xavier de Radiguès is a seasoned medical epidemiologist who has spent the majority of his career working in contexts of natural and/or man-made disasters with Médecins Sans Frontières/Epicentre, Médecins du Monde, and the World Health Organization.
Open to everyone | Booking required
Bar open
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Hosting the Series is Sandra Djuvara Melone, CEO of Zancora Consulting, which she founded in 2021, with a strong expertise in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, crisis management, human rights and, not last, gender. With a vast experience on the ground, she has worked across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She knows first hand what living through civil war is like. Sandra is the Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of Search for Common Ground, Europe, one of the world’s leading international non-governmental organisations working in peacebuilding and conflict transformation, where she's been involved in various roles since 1995. Sandra is a founding member of the European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation (EPCPT), of the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO), and of the Child Soldiers Initiative (CSI). Before dedicating her career to conflict transformation, Sandra worked in human rights advocacy with Amnesty International, and in international education.
Bar & snacks
SINGLES APERO
Social | Sat 13th Dec | 7-9pm
The Singles Apero is our popular series of monthly encounters where you can meet other social singles in a safe space without matching pressure. Feel free to bring any single friends along or just come by yourself.
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in partnership with The Brussels Times
Social | Tue 16th Dec | 7.30-10.30pm
Put your general (and Brussels Times!) knowledge to the test at our Pub Quiz night with The Brussels Times! Come with a team or join one when you arrive – we’ll match you up.
Join us for fun night of trivia, drinks & good company. Bring your knowledge & let’s quiz!
Maximum table size - 5.
Quiz starts at 7.30pm sharp!
Come alone and make a table with others or with friends. No more than 5 people per table.
Open to all | Bar open with drinks & snacks
Voice & Connection: A Singing Circle for All
with singer & vocal coach Gudrun Roos from “Zing je zen”
Wellbeing / Thurs 18th Nov / 7-8.30pm
*This event will only go ahead if there are 15 people registered.
Let go of the belief that you can’t sing or that your voice isn’t good enough - singing is a natural way to express yourself and connect with others.
Join us for a unique singing circle where we focus on feeling the vibrations of our voices, not on perfection or technique.
Together, we’ll explore rhythms, melodies, and sounds, allowing everyone’s unique voice to shine without judgment. Whether we’re drawing inspiration from shamanic chants, mantras, or spontaneous melodies, this is a space for deep connection and relaxation.
Singing in a group is a powerful, energizing experience that will leave you feeling rejuvenated and free.
Come as you are - no musical experience or knowledge is needed!
ACCES
Bar & snacks & light food
Website: www.zingjezen.be
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zingjezen/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zingjezen
with Andreea Petre-Goncalves
Ideas / Conversations | Sat 10th Jan | 5-7pm
Join us for a hopeful conversation with Andreea. Stay tuned, more details coming soon.
Open to everyone
Andreea Petre-Goncalves was 8 years old when totalitarian Communism collapsed overnight in her native Romania. She saw then how quickly yesterday’s absolute truth can become tomorrow reviled atrocity. She knows that societal narratives can shift fast, and when they do, they make deep system re-set possible. For two decades she worked for international development, human rights, health and sustainability in the EU institutions and international NGOs. In 2019 she set up Flare, a Brussels-based think-and-do tank that experiments with practical ways of shifting the collective ideas we hold of what is normal and desirable. This work builds on 15 years of her researching and writing about societal narrative shifts. She is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader and a member of Global Diplomacy Lab.
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
Culture | Thurs 15th Jan | 7:00-8:30 pm
'...lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds' - The Guardian
László Krasznahorkai's magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable, with only pure and noble soul to be found...A powerful, surreal novel.
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre.
Art and Terror Sandra Melone & Alexandra David
Art and Terror
Sandra Melone & Alexandra David
Conversations | Sat 17th Jan | 5-7pm
Terrorist and insurgent groups use songs, poems, images, and videos as weapons, to recruit, justify violence, and to glorify their cause. Drawing on her Art & Terror research, Alexandra David shows how analysing this cultural output sheds light on motives, identities, and fears, and why ignoring it weakens efforts to prevent radicalisation and build peace.
To join Sandra Melone is Alexandra David, a Brussels-based political analyst and journalist, and the founder of Art & Terror, a platform examining how art and media shape conflict and extremist narratives. A former researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel, she writes for The Times of Israel and Travel Tomorrow on culture, politics, and radicalisation.
Social | Sat 17th Jan | 7-9pm
Ideas / Salon | Thurs 22nd Jan | 6.30-8.30 pm
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The speaker will start at 7pm.
Not a Member yet? Join Full Circle now & come to events at the Members' rate!
Many among us are shocked and disconcerted by the rise of intolerance and hate. Across Europe, several countries have been far from immune from far-right politics. What is going on within the well-organised groups that seek to undermine our social fabric? How do we resist the forces of extremism on the rise in our societies? Nick Lowles, founder of Britain’s leading antifascist organisation, HOPE not hate, joins us to discuss what must be done about it, calling for undeterred optimism and action.
Nick has spent his entire adult life organising against fascism - facing countless threats on the way. Drawing from 35 years of campaigning and journalism, he shows how anti-immigration, antisemitic and Islamophobic attacks have proliferated in the modern world. Speaking from experience, Lowles offers practical ways and powerful examples to defeat the far right. His findings are rightly challenging, but can't be ignored. When intolerance becomes protagonist, we come together across our differences to win real, positive change. Hard as it can seem, HOPE can triumph over hate.
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Nick Lowles is chief executive of Hope not Hate, the UK's largest anti-racism and anti-extremism movement. He was the former editor of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.
GOOD READS
How to defeat the far-right: Lessons from hope not hate (2025).
KEY LINKS
HOPE not hate website
We only have 120 tickets and we always sell out!!
It's time to dust off your dancing shoes and join a traditional Scottish ceilidh.
No previous experience or dancing skills required - the band will be calling out the steps as we go along. If you're a ceilidh regular then you know how much fun it is!
Bring your friends or come along but please, no spikey heels on our rather beautiful wooden floor.
*7.30pm - Doors open
*8.00pm - Start dancing!
*10.30pm - Band finishes
*Ticket includes 1 drink (beer, wine or soft)
*Book your dinner by clicking the image below:
Bar & light food
The Hoggies are the original Brussels-based Scottish ceilidh band.
Ideas / Conversations | Sat 7th Feb | 5-7pm
Join us for a hopeful conversation with Andreea Stay tuned, more details coming soon
Flesh by David Szalay
Culture | Thurs 12th Feb | 7:00-8:30 pm
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman – as his only companion. When a clandestine relationship begins between them, his life spirals out of control. As the years pass, István moves from the army to the circles of London’s elite. His competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth win him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.
David Szalay is the author of six works of fiction, including London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Social | Sat 14th Feb | 7-9pm
Ideas / Conversations | Sat 7th Mar | 5-7pm
Ideas / Salon | Thurs 12th Mar | 6.30-8.30 pm
In today’s atomised and polarised world, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us. Why do some people become radicalised? And who is most susceptible to ideological thinking? Can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas? Dr Leor Zmigrod is a pioneer in the field of ‘political neuroscience’, and drawing on her groundbreaking research she uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours.
Political beliefs and ideologies are not just transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies, but deeply connected to the biology of our brain, able to even change our neural architecture. Regardless of your political stance, Zmigrod will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain. Find out about rigid thinking in ourselves and others, and how to recognise our ability to resist irrational rules and authority.
Dr Leor Zmigrod is an award-winning scientist and author, political psychologist and neuroscientist investigating why some brains are susceptible to extreme ideologies and how minds can break free from rigid dogmas. The Ideological Brain is her first book. Her research has also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, TIME, New Scientist, Financial Times, The Times, amongst other international outlets. She was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Science & Healthcare category, and has received numerous awards in science. Her research explores the psychology of ideological extremism using methods from experimental psychology, cognitive science, political science, and neuroscience. In particular, she investigates the cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological characteristics that might act as vulnerability factors for radicalization and ideological behaviour.
The Ideological Brain. A radical science of susceptible minds (2025).
Leor Zmigrod website
Social | Sat 14th Mar | 7-9pm
Open to all singles | Booking required
Indignity by Lea Ypi
Culture | Thurs 26th Mar | 6-7 pm
*Exceptionally, doors open at 5.30pm. The book club begins at 6pm sharp.
This month we exceptionally gather around a great read in the company of the author herself! Join Lea Ypi and fellow readers to discuss Indignity: A life reimagined.
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When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. She investigates the truth about her family's past by tracing the steps of her grandmother through the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. With its philosophical depth and historical context, the book blends memoir and historical investigation, exploring the struggle to preserve individual dignity against grand political narratives and surveillance. Indignity is both about Ypi's personal journey and about survival in an age of extremes, about what we can truly know about those closest to us and about the moral authority with which we can judge the acts of previous generations.
Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty languages.
Ideas / Salon | Thurs 26th Mar | 6.30-8.30 pm
Political philosopher Lea Ypi returns to Full Circle to explore themes of dignity, history, memory, identity, and nationhood - prompted by an online photo of her happy grandparents on their 1941 honeymoon, while war raged all over Europe. Records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania - or at least that had been the official story until that moment. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past - the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family delving into secret police archives, Ypi grapples with uncertainty.
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, she explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? Blending memoir with historical investigation, we dive into the struggle to preserve individual dignity against surveillance and grand political narratives.
Lea Ypi (FBA, FAE) is Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at LSE, a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. A native of Albania, she has degrees in Philosophy and in Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a PhD from the European University Institute and was a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the author of Indignity: A Life Reimagined and Free: Coming of Age at the end of History, both published by Penguin Press as well as Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, published by Oxford University Press. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and won numerous prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Award, the Ridenhour Prize for truth-telling, the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement. She coedits the journal Political Philosophy and occasionally writes for the Financial Times and the Guardian.
Indignity, A life reimagined (2025); Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (2021); The Architectonic of Reason (2021); The Meaning of Partisanship (2016, with Jonathan White)
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett
Culture | Thurs 16th Apr | 7:00-8:30 pm
‘Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent.’ ― Karl Ove Knausgaard
Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage –a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss—make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? How do we let them go? In this tour de force of fiction, the inventive Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including The White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, New York Times Magazine and New Yorker. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is her third work of fiction.
Ideas / Conversations | Sat 18th Apr | 5-7pm
HOW A MORE EQUAL ECONOMY CAN SAVE OUR POLITICAL IDEALS
Ideas / Salon | Mon 20th Apr | 6.30-8.30 pm
Democracy has been hollowed out by capitalism. A narrow view of markets and their aims—prioritizing efficiency, profit, and growth—now dominates thinking about democracy itself. Citizens are ignorant of the deep principles of self-governance, having long since adopted a facile equation between democracy and voting as a consumer choice. Lisa Herzog argues that democracy is still possible, but only if democratic values get embedded in everyday experience—including economic experience. That requires new ways of thinking about markets and their goals, and real reforms.
Lisa speaks about the foundational structures of a democratic economy, in which markets are not just tools for maximizing profit, but instead balance growth with goals like ecological sustainability and the preservation of time outside of work. These are not utopian dreams, Herzog contends. The proposals of democratic economics are already being tested around the world. And the shift in social norms that are needed is already under way.
Lisa Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen. She works at the intersection of political philosophy and economic thought. Herzog has published on the philosophical dimensions of markets (both historical and systemical), liberalism and social justice, ethics in organizations and the future of work. She currently focuses on workplace democracy, professional ethics, and the role of knowledge in democracies. She is a co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Review of Social Economy.
The Democratic Marketplace: How a More Equal Economy Can Save Our Political Ideals (2025); Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (2022).
Ideas / Conversations | Sat 16th May | 5-7pm
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