I was browsing in a bookshop today, and ended up looking at Played in London: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play by Simon Inglis. It’s a handsome and enticing publication about London’s sporting venues, clearly the product of superb research, which is top of my must-buy list, just as soon as I haveRead More
I didn’t know what to call this post, but whenever I’ve been through some tumultuous period and come out the other side, the exultant title of D.H. Lawrence’s 1917 book of poems Look! We Have Come Through! somehow springs to mind, so it’ll do. April has been the busiest month, and it has meant thatRead More
On 1 August University of Exeter Press is publishing my book, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925. It is based on my PhD thesis, which I completed in 2003, but it has been updated with reference to new research in the field, though equally the word-length has been cut downRead More
Time was when little was written about colour in film, or colour in the arts generally, except for technical studies. You could read about how a dye or a pigment was made, or how a colour film projector operated, but little about the significance of colours, be that culturally, socially or even aesthetically. Michael Pastoureau,Read More
It’s that time of the year when people start producing lists of their books of the year. This year the choice ought to be an easy one. The book of 2012 is one collated between 1937 and its author’s death in 1950, then not published until 1985, left to dwindle into obscurity except in theRead More
I’m going to establish some occasional series and will start with a series that reviews books on film. The emphasis is going to be on unfamiliar or neglected titles. No one researching film needs to be told of the value of, say, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film or Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler,Read More