Judi Dench played Barbara in Major Barbara (1962) with Edward Woodward who played Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1971) with Jenny Agutter who played in Hedvig Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1971) with Denholm Elliott who played Alan Quine in Donkey’s Years (1980) with Penelope Keith who played Amanda Prynne in Private Lives (1976) withRead More
I’m going to start up an occasional series. It’ll bring together web resources on a particular theme. Often it will be triggered by a new resource that I will have come across, and then added links to other such sites to fill out the picture. And I promise (to myself) to keep the accompanying textRead More
The other night I watched Housekeeping, for the first time in some twenty-five years. It’s the first film that the Scottish director Bill Forsyth made in America, and though it was warmly received by critics at the time, it had few of the trademark comic qualities that made Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero so popular,Read More
This is the text of a blog post on the archiving of news which I wrote recently for the British Library’s Newsroom blog. Wherever possible – or wherever it interests me – I’m reproducing texts here which have been written on other platforms. The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are toRead More
David Bowie? I never cared that much for him. Some catchy songs, but he wrote about aliens and space travel. How many songs has Bob Dylan – as a useful measure of quality – written about aliens or space travel? Zero. I rest my case. And Lemmy? One hell of a guy, clearly, but reallyRead More
At the British Library (the institution which kindly helps me keep body and soul together) we regularly make promotional videos. They are snappy little numbers, designed to show what a bright, inviting and relevant place the Library is. The editing is brisk, the graphics float informatively over the screen, and the music is toe-tapping. YetRead More