James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
When we describe someone as “forgottenâ€, we generally mean that they’ve fallen off the publishing schedules for a decade or two. No more than that: it’s publishing’s survival as a career choice for the British upper middle classes that’s made it possible for a James Lees-Milne to stay on Waterstones’ shelves while an Alan Blumlein…
Anyone with an acquaintance with Victorian history as it’s been written since the late 1960s will be familiar with the idea of the Great Victorian Masturbation Panic. For reasons unknown, we are told, our nineteenth century forebears got it into their heads that masturbation was harmful – even fatal given time – and that they…
He was one of the schoolmasters of genius I was so nearly taught by but never was, and at the end of the year he called all of us into the hall, dimmed the lights and played us this: Afterwards, we trailed out into the daylight, uniformed and redundant under Bedfordshire’s big white…
The road outside the cinema was busy, dualled, and on these wet nights its blacktop dazzled and fizzed. British filmgoing was not quite at the end of its VHS-inspired sag, but it wouldn’t be long, and the buildings on either side of the Odeon were empty and derelict respectively. White-socked mullets and blousons smoked in…
Twenty-two years after “Anything Goes” premiered on Broadway, the first film remake of Kingsley Amis’s comic novel “Lucky Jim” limped into damp cinemas up and down the length of this little island we call home. He wrote about it to Philip Larkin: In public, I am all smiles about this, but in private, ah ha…
In the 1970s, David Hockney and L.S. Lowry were the artists children had heard of. Hockney’s modernity, bright colours and light touch appealed to schoolteachers, and Lowry – Lowry, of course, had been the subject of this memorable, kindly pop song: I’d be grateful to Hockney, later on, both for his enthusiasm for new…
The destruction of the airship R101 on its maiden flight on 5 October 1930 ended British dreams of linking the empire with a fleet of luxury hotels in the clouds. It ended something else, too: it ended Bedfordshire. I grew up with the great airship hangars at Cardington visible from my bedroom window, and the…
In the end, all we wanted was somewhere safe for the children to grow up. What we got was quite different: towerblocks, and tarmacced playgrounds studded with broken glass, and irregular bus services that took an hour to get anywhere worthwhile. Silence without warmth in the afternoon, and shouting at night. It’s not controversial…
Two Kinds of Kindness McCall Smith and P G Wodehouse by Garreteer
By the time we get around to the how-to books with poetry, we’ve already admitted something – probably not to our detriment – namely, that we’ve stopped thinking of competing with the great white dead males. In fact, we stopped thinking about that quite some time ago and now all we want to do is…
In the early 1980s, I cycled there. A hot day: I remember leaning my bike against a barbed wire fence, the kick of the aspartame from my diet cola and the long, vertiginous note of swifts flying too high above us to see. Â Britain’s barbed wire fences have slipped away in the night and are…
Learning from other writers has its difficulties, not the least of which is considering your heroes “other writers” in the first place: there’s something frightful and vertiginous about taking on e.g. Nabakov or Ted Hughes as a colleague. It turns out that that’s true even of the infinitely cuddlier P.G. Wodehouse, and then there’s the…
