Picturegoers

Nine years ago I started up a website that gathered examples of eyewitness testimony from people going to see motion pictures. I called it Picturegoing, which felt catchy, and the dot com address was available. Today, I am happy to announce, the book version has been published. The book is entitled Picturegoers – because aRead More

The book of news

Such has been the flurry of business surrounding the British Library’s exhibition on the history of British news, Breaking the News, that I have neglected to mention here what should be its most lasting legacy: the book. So, at the end of April 2022, the British Library published Breaking the News: 500 Years of NewsRead More

Monochrome

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about the director Peter Jackson’s plans to produce documentary featuring colourised footage from the First World War. Though nothing was available of the film bar a single still, I was alarmed by the rationale behind it. The argument seemed to be that digital technology now allowed usRead More

On indexes

Some years ago I had a bright idea. It was for a mechanism which would bring together all of the indexes of digitised books to make one super-index linking back to each of those texts. Yes there would be huge unevenness between the individual indexes, and yes it had a Borgesian air about it (Borges’Read More