If you have a favourite poet then among their works you will have a favourite poem. It is where the heart lies. One of the poets I most cherish is Ben Jonson (1572-1637), and the poem of his to which I always return is ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’. The poem comes from Jonson’s 1616Read More
Pity the poor British Library, an institution which simultaneously does such great things, yet at the same time seems to have utterly lost its way. The cyberattack of 2023 has created damage not only to its digital infrastructure (the full extent of which I fear has yet to be admitted…) but to the institution’s mindset.Read More
Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge begins with a notorious scene in which Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, when drunk and after an argument with his wife Susan, auctions her and his young daughter Elizabeth-Jane at a country fair. The pair are bought by a sailor for five guineas. The following day HenchardRead More
It is always interesting to read a book’s acknowledgment pages. I invariably make a point of doing so, even if the names mean nothing to me. Mindful of those who merit or may be expecting to be thanked for having assisted the author along the way, people are acknowledged according to particular categories. There areRead More
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