1. I remember thinking there was nothing more beautiful than fog on a football field. 2. I remember cuckoo spit. 3. I remember being frightened of Wass Water in the Lake District because the water was so dark and deep. 4. I remember wearing garters to hold up my socks. 5. I remember Nina BadenRead More
“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper. The regulations now coming into force make digital legalRead More
The British Film Institute has issued a new version of its database, which is a huge improvement on what has been available online before now. The new service, BFI Collections Search, for the first time combines its bibliographic, filmographic and technical databases, something the BFI has been trying to engineer for years (decades even). ThisRead More
Highlights from NRK’s ten-hour Nordlandsbanen train journey programme In December the Norwegian broadcaster NRK put on a ten-hour transmission of a train journey. Filmed from the front of a train cab travelling along the Nordlandsbanen line between Trondheim and Bodø (a distance of 438 miles), the programme gained one million viewers, or a fifth ofRead More
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you … T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ The Third Man (1949) is one of the most satisfying films ever made.Read More
I rather enjoyed putting together a post a few weeks ago on obscure new wave records of the 1979-80 period which can be found on YouTube and probably nowhere else, so here’s a follow-up. We’re back in that marvellous period ushered in by the punk revolution of 1976-77, when all of the rules that supposedlyRead More
There is coming, I think, a great change in how we discover things on the Internet. It is one which will play a major part in making the moving image central to knowledge and research, which is the goal that I am trying to pursue professionally. The great change will be brought about by speech-to-textRead More
I’ve only collected three autographs in my lifetime (getting friends to sign copies of their books for me doesn’t count). The first was when I was aged 10 or so. It was Bertie Mee, the manager of Arsenal football club. I forget the circumstances, and I lost the autograph long ago. The second was theRead More
I want to go where they’ve never seen snow Send my Giro to Cairo Has there ever been, in the entire history of popular music, a finer opening to a song lyric? As I trudged home from work through the snowy wastes of North Kent, the words came back to me – ye gods, fromRead More
I have spent the past few months reading Sir Steven Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades. It’s one of those works that has sat on the shelves for a long while, daring me to find the stamina to read through all 1,430 pages. But one day – to be precise, it was the dayRead More