There was an interesting moment in the heat of the Olympic Games coverage on the BBC when the presenter Clare Balding told us to look to at some sport in progress – I think it was the golf – saying “let’s see what he does next”, or words to that effect, as some crucial puttRead More
Well, it’s summertime, the Olympic Games are in full flood, and my mind is on holiday. So I can only set aside the usual sort of cod-philosophical post for the time being, and instead revert to lists. Maybe a series of lists. I’ve not produced any lists for ages, and they’re easy (or so itRead More
Newspapers may be in decline, but that isn’t stopping publishers coming up with fresh ways in which to produce the news in print.Over the past two years we have seen four new ‘national’ newspapers appear in the UK: The National, The New Day, 24 – The North’s National and The New European. Each presents aRead More
The Olympic Games will be upon us soon, and I don’t know how I feel about them. It’s not the stories of political corruption, or of state-sponsored drug-taking, or even the mounting absurdities of the Games themselves, but simply that I haven’t got over the last Olympic Games as yet. London 2012 was perfect. WhatRead More
Returning (a little later than planned) to this occasional series on useful online resources, here’s a listing of newspaper archives. I happen to work at one of the world’s largest newspaper archives, where we have digitised some 14 million pages on the British Newspaper Archive, with many more millions to come. But this is aRead More
Not long after YouTube appeared in 2005, I started to take note of the phenomenon of online Shakespeare. I had been interested in Shakespeare and film for a long time – it was really Shakespeare that encouraged my interest in film in the first place – but here was something quite new. Previously Shakespeare filmRead More
Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen… Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Amid all the reports of tumultuous things thatRead More
I’ve been adding more images to my Flickr pages reflecting the works of Charles Urban. Having started with pictures from his 1903 catalogue We put the World Before You, I’ve turned to another treasure among his catalogues, the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects (1912). Copies of this catalogue are rarer than hen’s teeth, and I’mRead More
Why sit on stuff when you can give it away and be useful? Well exactly, and so I’ve been uploading some of my Charles Urban images to a new folder on Flickr. As well as plundering my digital archive, I’ve been copying and pasting images from Urban’s 1903 film catalogue, We Put the World BeforeRead More
Many years ago I read an article in the Sunday Times magazine about the island of St Helena. It told of a place that to me seemed some sort of paradise. It was the one of the remotest inhabited islands on the planet, a lump of rock in the middle of the south Atlantic, andRead More