James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
There’s not a lot left of the reputation of Harry Price, ghosthunter. Nor should they be: tolerance of exaggeration and fakery in someone who has set out their stall against those very things is a bit much to ask of a world that had just suffered the losses of the Great War. But Price is…
(Anyone with the slightest interest in Kipling will enjoy Mathew Lyons’ two pieces at Normblog: Mathew Lyons on ‘Kipling and His Critics’ and Mathew Lyons on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling . Much more Lyons via his excellent and recommended Twitter feed.) Perhaps they thought it reduced the value, because I picked it up for a couple of…
It all began with me knocking on a door. I was a student, at the end of a bad year. My stepfather had absconded, my engagement ring had been returned, and my dearest relative had passed away suddenly. My 80s were dying in an inglorious ditch. It’s always the same advice in these situations: get…
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender lives the dream of many a would-be litterateur and finds what we’ve all long suspected to be true: the past is close and can be escaped into for real. An open-top cab comes for him after the clock strikes twelve, and whisks him off to meet Scott…
For children born in 1967 and 1968, it was simple. Before we were born, it was black and white. For the whole of our life, it’s been colour. Colour television, colour supplements, Kodacolor. We brought the whole spectrum with us. And in Britain, the debris of the black and white days was everywhere. For me,…
There was an EP of his amongst my father’s records, so I must have first come across King Oliver on one of those blank mid-1980s summer afternoons when everyone else was out and there was nothing else to do. There’s always a sense of curtailment about a parent’s record collection. At least, there was…
The first time it happened was at my great-grandfather’s terraced house in Black Tom in the years immediately prior to the Great War. There’d been a death in the family, and then a funeral. My grandmother and her five sisters shared a bedroom, and sat up late into the night, or must have done,…
To Robert Conquest from Philip Larkin 7 April 1969 ..By the way, you might tell K. if you see him that there’s a 12†LP of all the Banks sides (plus Oh Peter with Henry Allen vocal) and all the Bland sides (Who Stole Gabriel’s Horn, Shine Shoes & Gonna Be You). I’ll send him…
You don’t get to choose the books you learn to read from, but they can stay with you for life. I was given the basics elsewhere, but once I knew the ropes, the Reverend W. Awdrey’s “Railway Series†set me properly on my way. You may not have met these. You will have if you’ve…
From about 1914 on, you can almost feel colour film trying to make itself happen. Any list of early colour feature films has the same air to it of frustration and heartbreak: “technicolor inserts” in this movie or that, which is also listed as “Lost Film” or “Extant only in Black and White.” Three…
When Seebohm Rowntree ventured into the pubs of York in 1912, he was anticipating the worst. From a Quaker family, he had already crossed swords with the brewing establishment in 1901, linking adulterated beer with a string of deaths from arsenic poisoning. The link between alcohol and poverty was absolute: the pubs would no doubt…
It’s true to say that the United Kingdom never really threw itself into sound recording experiments with the gusto of the United States, but nonetheless there are some fascinating survivals, and we’re going to showcase five of them here. They encompass government, domesticity, transport, street soundscapes and industrialization and each has its own story to…
