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
One of the great pleasures, and privileges, of living in this corner of north Kent is the woodland. Near to where I live, there are three interconnected woods: Ashenbank, Shorne Wood and Cobham Wood, sadly bisected by the A2 and the Eurostar railway line. Each is an ancient woodland, made all the more interesting forRead More
The news that Mike Ratledge has died knocks away another of the props on which my formative years were built. Ratledge was a founder member and keyboard player for the Soft Machine, a man whose furious, buzzing organ sound – somewhere between a frentic soprano sax and a power saw – burned itself into theRead More
I was glancing through the statistics page of my Flickr account the other day when I noticed that I had just passed two million views. That feels like quite something for someone with limited photographic ability and maybe a narrow range of interests, or at least a narrow range of places visited and photographed. IRead More
In Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters there’s a scene where Mickey, a despairing television writer trying to seek a meaning in life (played by Allen, inevitably) is walking through Central Park. In the middle of his existential crisis he looks at the joggers who pass him by. We hear his thoughts: Oh!Read More
Last in my reviews of the year comes books (I saw many films but time has run out for making a constructive narrative out of them). I read a lot in 2024, though it never feels like I have read enough, always with a book at my side to the point that I practically panicRead More