• Photograph showing a page from a medieval manuscript.

Black and white photo of a man dressed in a suit and tie sitting in a bath and holding a phone

Adrian Brunel: The Systematic Jackdaw

by Josephine Botting Approaching an archival collection the scale of Adrian Brunel’s is a daunting prospect. Every box contains a hotchpotch of items, which at first defy coherence: snapshots, letters, diaries, cuttings, contracts, scribblings on scraps of paper, legal summons…

Image of Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey, Britishness and Class

by John White In the second of a short series of extracts from British Cinema and a Divided Nation (EUP, 2022), John White looks at Downton Abbey (Michael Engler, 2019). The quick series of shots presented to the audience at…

New Realism book cover

Making of ‘New Realism’

Explore how the recently published New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema by David Forrest came to be. The writing of a book begins with conversations, and this one was no different. In 2015, I was invited to a film festival in…

Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered

Sixties British Cinema – Reconsidered!

Read Laura Mayne’s overview of the new book Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, which re-evaluates a critically neglected period in British film history. Has here been any decade more inconsistent in the public imagination than the 1960s? Lived recollections of the…

Love across the Atlantic: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

Love Across the Atlantic

Read on to catch a glimpse of one of the chapters from Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture, edited by Barbara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Louis Trost. Earlier this year, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry…

Shining the spotlight on British cinema’s female stars

Britain has long had a contradictory relationship to movie stardom, as two articles from the fan magazine Picturegoer, both by the same writer, both from 1943, eloquently demonstrate. In October, Lionel Collier had asked hopefully ‘are we making our own…