It is sad to hear of the recent death of Don Swift, former cataloguer at the National Film Archive, as the BFI National Archive was known in his time. Don was steady, wise, understanding and deeply knowledgeable (especially about mountaineering and cricket – his detailed shotlists of archival cricket films are masterpieces of description andRead More
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
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
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
I have written two more profiles for the Women Film Pioneers Project which were published this week. The WFPP is a long-running project at Columbia University to produce short online biographies of women who contributed to silent cinema, with the idea of rebalancing, or making you think again, about film history – or history inRead More
For the last few months of his life, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh lived in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. He had been discharged from the clinic at Saint-Rémy where he had been treated for mental disorder, moving to Auvers to be near to local doctor Paul Gachet and his brother Theo, resident inRead More
‘I saw them play.’ Those are precious words to be said of any notable sporting figure, that you played your part in making them great because you were there in the crowd, witness to their exceptionalism. So I saw Derek Underwood play, the Kent and England left-arm spinner, who died aged seventy-eight on 15 AprilRead More
On 21 February 1996, the former Regent Polytechnic Theatre at the University of Westminster hosted a film show. It recreated the first exhibition of projected films for a paying audience in the UK, at the same venue, 100 years before. It was entirely appropriate that the projectionist on that centenary day, operating a Lumière Cinématographe,Read More