That last blog post on the battle of Flodden has reminded of a list we used to maintain at the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive’s cataloguing department of memorable footage requests. Having a film collection that covered just about every subject on earth, you were bound to get some wide-ranging requests from footage researchers,Read More
All wars have had their own sounds, but in their aftermath they all sound the same. While cries and screams have been a constant, the noise of war that has changed from the whizz of arrows to the clash of metals, the charging of cavalry, the roar of cannon and gunfire, the explosion of bombs,Read More
I have a new book being published on 1 September 2025. At the start of this year I had no expectation of having any book published at all, and certainly not a collection of my essays. But strange things have happened, and Let Me Dream Again: Essays on the Moving Image is an unexpected butRead More
I have been in dispute with a copy editor. I am a great admirer of the keen-eyed and patient people who find amendments to be made in a text the author could have sworn was perfect. But in the case of Dont Look Back (1967) I had to defend my corner. The said copy editorRead More
It sits on the edge of the Northumbrian coast, an intermittent island joined twice a day to the mainland by the tides, before retreating into isolation once more. It lies low, save for a plug of rock on the eastern side, on which sits a small, sixteenth-century castle. The island is viewable down much ofRead More
Long, long ago, when at school, I was presented with a passage from a novel to assess. I was sixteen, maybe, in an English class. We must have been given many such passages from books and told to write a short essay on them. I can vaguely remember the text book, which had several suchRead More
Here’s a major thing. Film Atlas is an online encyclopedia of film formats. Launched to the public last month, it is a collaboration between the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the George Eastman Museum, with funding from the Louis B. Mayer Foundation, the George Eastman Museum Publishing Trust Endowment, and FIAF (Eileen BowserRead More
I have bought myself a chess set. I have several chess sets already, but I spotted this one, or one like it, among the remarkable collection of knick-knackery in the Limehouse Library Hotel in London (how many libraries have been converted into hotels?) and was entranced. There was a similar set on eBay and nowRead More
One of my favourite lines in all film literature is in a booklet note for the National Film Theatre, possibly in the early 1990s. The NFT was showing what I think was Rookery Nook, a British title from 1930. It was an early sound film and one of a series made around that time ofRead More
It was when I was undertaking some family history research, twenty-five or more years ago, when many genealogical resources first began to appear online, that I came across Thomas Pooley. There were rumours in the family of an ancestor who had been imprisoned for blasphemy, sometime in the nineteenth century, but it felt like aRead More