“Jim didn’t read his lectures, he performed them. He was teased by more than one of his hosts for being a prima donna and needing everything just so. His talks weren’t slide lectures, but magic lantern shows. He loved the tricks of light: the tiny details vastly enlarged, the glow of the backlit pictures. He was transfixed by the effect of seeing one of David Jones’s small engravings made enormous on screen, yet with each whisker-thin line still distinct. Jim had often talked about the lantern’s ‘enhancement–and enchantment!’ But David never understood it, until, in the summer of 1943, he went to a lantern lecture on William Blake. ‘I’ve always reckoned I “liked” Blake,’ 3 David wrote to Jim. ‘But my God!–that size & with the luminosity they fair bowl you over.’ Jim dwelt on the line from St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ 4 A speaker could get across what a writer could not, convert a listener to his cause. Jim was always early. He made time to arrange every seat. He sat in one chair after another, all over the hall. He wanted to be sure that everyone would be comfortable and that everyone could see. More than anything, he wanted the audience to fall ‘under the spell of his enthusiasm’. 5 When it went well, the silence at the end was so long that Jim had to tell them the lecture was over. Don’t take Jim’s word for it. Jim collected testimonials which he had printed in a smartly professional pamphlet. He offered a series of possible lectures, each an hour long, with forty to fifty slides, at $ 100 a go.”
— Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists by Laura Freeman
https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/kshare?asin=B0BB5WNBBJ&id=zgahldx5tzh6vi75c335eqcbcy