Remember those awkward childhood experiences of being dragged to hear middle-aged men play Peter and the Wolf or The Nutcracker? Not that all children’s concerts back then were tedious and prissy. At their best, they could even be witty and illuminating, like the Young People’s Concerts staged by Leonard Bernstein at the Lincoln Center in the 1960s or some of the concert- lectures still regularly organised by the Jeunesses Musicales. But lectures they remained.

On 31 October, the 74th edition of the Boekenbeurs (Book Fair) - the biggest event of its kind in Belgium, and one of the biggest in the world - opens its doors in Antwerp. "Of its kind" because, explains Patricia De Laet of Boek.be, the publishing industry organisation that runs the show, the Boekenbeurs is an event for the public at large, unlike, say, the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is primarily an industry event.

The history of the University of Antwerp offers a major surprise: it was founded only seven years ago. That’s a massive 578 years after the Catholic University of Leuven, and 186 years after the University of Ghent. So was Antwerp in the academic backwoods all this time while the boundaries of academia were being expanded elsewhere in Flanders?

The Catholic University of Leuven, or KULeuven, as it’s know locally, is one of the oldest universities in Europe: it was founded in 1425. In the following centuries, the university has attracted illustrious minds, including the 16th-century humanist Erasmus (who picked Leuven to found a Collegium for the study of Hebrew, Latin and Greek), mathematician Gemma Frisius and anatomist Andreas Vesalius. It also became a respected training hub for Roman Catholic intellectuals from Protestant countries.