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
Category: People
O Pioneers!
I have two definitions of what history is, which I wrote years ago and have repeated several times thereafter – and here they are again: 1. History is what was known once but has been forgotten 2. History is the present’s interpretation of the past It’s worth considering these when contemplating the subject of women’sRead More
Charles Darwin’s daily round
Down House, Charles Darwin’s home for forty years, lies in the village of Downe, south of Orpington in what is technically the London Borough of Bromley, but is a part of Kent really. Darwin purchased the house in 1842 and remained there until his death in 1882. It is a functional rather than a beautifulRead More
100 portraits of Frank Auerbach
Promotional video for the Frank Auerbach exhibition An exhibition is currently running at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery in London: Frank Auerbach: Twenty Self-Portraits. It brings together recent self-portraits – nine paintings and eleven drawings – by the ninety-two-year-old German-British painter. Although renowned for his searching portraits of others, he has seldom drawn or painted himself.Read More
Lines on a poet and a scientist
The poet was a scientist The scientist was a poet The one always saw the world with the eyes of the other ‘In the microscope’, for instance Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear murmuring, the revolt of immense estates. It is the view of one who understood the puzzle and theRead More
The lost garden of Evelyn Dunbar
Ever since Eden was lost, we have been trying to find it again. Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors that followed him identified various parts of the Americas as the Garden of Eden. Confident claims for its location have been made for Mesopotamia, Armenia, Iran, Jackson County Missouri (according to some Mormons), and Bedford (according toRead More
The floor of heaven
Down a roadside divided by a canal in the Dutch town of Franeker, you come across a smart museum frontage close to to a traditional Dutch brick building bearing the word ‘Planetarium’. Having purchased your ticket, you pass down narrow corridors built long before domestic spaces were designed to host public attractions. You enter anRead More
Harmony constant
Michael Nesmith has died. You feel like a part of you has disappeared when a voice that has been at the back of your head for as long as you can remember just goes. Nesmith was the droll guy with the woolly hat in The Monkees’ TV show, which those of my age watched religiouslyRead More
Harry Short – a marginal life
I find this photograph fascinating. Not for the man with the motion picture camera that looks like some form of primitive machine gun, not for the late Victorian gentlemen oozing privilege to the tip of their top hats, but the man on the far left. He is half in, half out of the picture, lookingRead More
Just a Brixton shop girl
The first feature film that Buster Keaton directed, The Three Ages, is not perhaps as familiar as it should be. A comic history of love in prehistoric, Roman and modern times, it has Keaton fighting his rival, Wallace Beery, over a girl and winning her against the odds each time. Allegedly parodying Intolerance, it isRead More