It may be hard to say for certain, but I don’t know that there has ever been a better title for a book than Too Naked for the Nazis. It’s the title of a biography by Alan Stafford of the legendary variety trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, and derives from an apparently genuine reaction byRead More
Could there be a better idea for a website than Six Degrees of Francis Bacon? Launched in beta form this week, the site is designed to demonstrate the social network of Britain over the period 1500-1700. Created by data miners and digital humanities scholars at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University, the site uses dataRead More
It’s always fun to play that game where you choose the person from history that you would most like to meet. Of course it would be fascinating to meet Cleopatra, or Socrates, or Dante, but language problems would hamper the encounter. So then among the English-speaking I could pick from warriors, composers, thinkers and writersRead More
The obituaries for the late David Nobbs have all concentrated on the television series that he wrote, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79). This was inevitable. It’s the work of his with which most people in Britain around at the time will be familiar, and it bequeathed to posterity a number of catchphrasesRead More
Back in 2009 I was set an interesting challenge. I was invited on behalf of a group investigating the lives of British women who had worked in silent film to take on the research into one of those about whom nothing much was known. I picked the name Mary Murillo. I knew nothing of her,Read More
The birth of the popular science film – Francis Martin Duncan appears as the scientist in Cheese Mites, the notorious film he made for Charles Urban in 1903. The full film was only recently discovered by Oliver Gaycken (lurking on YouTube under a made-up title) Two books are to be published shortly which cover theRead More
I paid a rare visit to the BFI Southbank the other day to see a programme of films entitled ‘The Birth of British Sci-Fi’, part of its Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season. The six films on show ranged from 1897, with G.A. Smith’s The X-Rays to A Message from Mars (1913), the firstRead More
On 18 February 1814 Lord Byron got up and read his morning newspaper, a fact that we know because he recorded the action later that day in his journal: Got up – redde the Morning Post containing the battle of Buonaparte, the destruction of the Custom House, and a paragraph on me as long asRead More
I have begun writing the lives of two people. I have been given 1,000 words in which to encapsulate the achievements, character and significance of two filmmakers, George Pearson and Albert E. Smith. It’s a commission from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for which I have written several such short biographies already, on ArthurRead More
I’m back from a few days in Paris, where (amongst other things) I visited two of the city’s cemeteries. I hadn’t planned to visit cemeteries on this short break, but the page on Père Lachaise in the city guide fell open in front of me and told me should go, and then Montparnasse cemetery wasRead More