Read just two so far on this list but plan to read the rest. The two I have read - Helen Garner’s diaries and Ian Leslie on John and Paul - are excellent.
Writer, festival director, interviewer, visiting professor UWE. Projects: ideas events, Future City Film Festival, John Boorman, John Berger, William Gray Walter, revisiting J B Priestley, and writing my book on Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
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Read just two so far on this list but plan to read the rest. The two I have read - Helen Garner’s diaries and Ian Leslie on John and Paul - are excellent.
Earl Grey tea with Richard Holmes’s wonderful book about researching and writing biography. Holmes’s work is outstanding. It’s a second reading for me - this time as it’s mentioned in Ian McEwan’s new novel and I’m interviewing him 16 September. I hope we have chance to discuss this.
Delighted to be hosting John Crace when he visits Bristol 19 September. He’s a wonderful, funny writer, with deep political knowledge. Here’s his latest column. Very few tickets left. Book here: redgravetheatre.com/event/2025/0...
I’d missed this. RIP the author of one of the very best biographies I’ve been lucky enough to read, The Man Who Went into the West, about R. S. Thomas. Obituary of Byron Rogers, who died last month.
The Bodleian organises and curates brilliant exhibitions. Look forward to this one on John le Carré and his collaborators very much. observer.co.uk/style/featur...
‘A tall, barrel-chested man with a mischievous cackle, for all his slyly beady eye and impish iconoclasm Byron Rogers was a kind man without a hint of malice. Commemorating the people “whose lives have been dusted aside by history”, in his daughter’s words, was for him an act of justice.’
As I start to increase substantially the days each week I spend on my book on Brunel part of the time is visiting his work and what remains. Here’s a fine view of the SS Great Britain today.
Last tickets for my Bristol show on September 19th. Please do come along. redgravetheatre.com/event/2025/0...
Tour round some of the Gromit Unleashed trail today in Bristol. Managed to see 20. Here’s most of them. 1/
No problem. I’m used to proofs.
Long wanted to read a biography of Peter Matthiessen. Thanks to @lancerichardson.bsky.social it is now possible. Thank you Chatto and Windus for the advance reading copy. Out late Autumn in the UK.
Thank you. Not seen this for many years. There was a follow up 10 years on. Hopefully the BBC archive can put this online too. And upload the John Boorman work from (and about) early 1960s Bristol. We’re showing one example 26 October. ti.to/film-noir-uk...
Reading Agency figures in Saturday Telegraph: 27 million or so UK adults ‘…say they do not regularly read by choice - 47 per cent of adults. Those ‘…aged 16 to 24 years old are the least engaged with reading, with 61 per cent identifying as either lapsed readers or non-readers…’.
Finished it last week. A terrific book.
More praise for @joannapocock.bsky.social wonderful new book. ‘Lyrical and clear-eyed at once, Pocock has reinvented the road-trip genre for a new age — an age, she argues, in which we lack the will to fully confront the drastic effects of our political and economic decisions.’
Saw Lady and the Tramp this morning in a glorious print for 70th anniversary rerelease. I’d forgotten that one of the dogs quotes Gorky from The Lower Depths: ‘Miserable being must find more miserable being. Then, he is happy’.
LTC Rolt: ‘Brunel…was more than a great engineer; he was an artist and a visionary, a great man with a strangely magnetic personality which uniquely distinguished him even in that age of powerful individualism in which he moved.’
A few of them. I remember I enjoyed them. I’ll dig out my set. I’ve got these lesser-known Rolt’s to read next.
Today’s reading. Another read of Rolt’s classic biography for my Brunel book and forthcoming talk at Ironbridge. My work seeks to supplement Rolt’s. And I hope I get a better cover than this reprint.
In one episode in The Newcomers - the six-part BBC series from 1964 we’re showing with @swsilents.bsky.social and others 26 October, you see Bristol at night. One extended scene is in an evangelical church in St Paul’s. Book here: www.southwestsilents.com/event-detail...
Glen is always worth reading (and following on here).
This is interesting but I felt flawed and rushed. Some funny moments and the body horror is well done.
Also saw at the cinema. I was a little apprehensive seeing Battleship Potemkin with a modern soundtrack. But it works well. It was a one-off showing so quite a decent audience.
Saw this over the weekend. Terrific, tight, excellently acted and directed. It’s a bad story dealt with well and with some hope too. We should see much more of Eva Victor as actor, writer, director. Tiny audience though.
Do you want some great reading about the dilemmas Labour faced when it was last in power? Well, you're in luck - because my book on New Labour is out in February, and you can pre-order it now for a mere twenty quid! manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526146328/
✨ The Encounters Film Festival 2025 Official Selection is now LIVE! An extraordinary collection of 105 exceptional films from fresh voices and celebrated auteurs from around the globe, this historic 30th edition showcases the very best in contemporary cinema. www.encounters.film/programme-an...
Good audience for my Teddy Talk.
Rebecca Mead on the current Persephone Books rediscovery best-seller about the rise of Nazism. I’ve read Crooked Cross and it’s recommended. Good to Read that Persephone is planning to publish more by Carson.
Coming up 26 October. One of the series that launched BBC2 in 1964 - made in Bristol about the city. Ironically, audiences in Bristol couldn’t see it until 1965 when an edited version was released on BBC1. This is the full three-hour version. Book here: www.southwestsilents.com/event-detail...
There’s a fine piece about @leaypi.bsky.social work and new book in The Sunday Times today:
I thought @leaypi.bsky.social Free was one of the best books of 2022. Her next book, Indignity, is out next month and I look forward very much to reading it. My 2022 interview with Lea Ypi is here. Transcript also available. www.bristolideas.co.uk/watch/lea-yp...
Anybody interested in our social, cultural and political history should be very concerned about this. The BBC - our BBC - has been a reflection of who we are & helped shaped who we have become. Restricting the archive in this way is an anathema on our understanding of ourselves.
Working closely with Bristol Archives over many years, including now the cataloguing of 33 years of Bristol Ideas’ work, I’ve appreciated the value of archives and been concerned about ongoing cutbacks. We need expansion. bsky.app/profile/eica...
If we had governments with real digital strategies access to archives would be free to anyone who wants to see them. Even with university pass I find myself paying for some. Instead that clueless idiot Peter Kyle is going after VPNs and espousing slop.
Agree on all points.
As an archive user, and reader and researcher who appreciates the value of archives, I have signed. I was about to do a subject access request too for research. More important, this is a critical archive about significant aspects of the life and work of the UK. It needs expansion, not restriction.
More for reading and discussion in Festival of Economics 18-21 November with @econ-observatory.bsky.social. Programme here: www.economicsobservatory.com/festival-of-...
‘The chancellor and her Treasury owe people the respect of being straightforward…Instead, we have ambiguous proposals leaking out and causing understandable concern. Heavily burdened taxpayers deserve better than this.’ www.thetimes.com/article/3379...
JB Priestley on Bristol in a BBC Talk (12 April 1937). ‘The Bristol Corporation, I believe, really understands Bristol. It has established a panel of architects who pass every new design, and that panel, I hope, refuses to pass vulgar villas and shops in the fake half-timber style.’
Whoever I get a parcel from @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social the package label has Mills & Boon at the top. Some might get the wrong impression here.
Financial Times today calls @joannapocock.bsky.social new book ‘…rigorous and rewarding’. It says: ‘I didn't want the ride to end because, for all the difficulties Pocock encounters and the suffering she observes, there are moments of "a strange sort of transcendence on the Greyhound.“‘
Simon Callow in The Times on Play for Today and new plays for today. www.thetimes.com/article/7bb9...
Current reading as it is mentioned in Ian McEwan’s new book and I hope we can discuss this in our event for @toppingsbath.bsky.social 16 September. Event booking here: www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/...
Keep me posted (and DM me the publicist as I might be able to help - I ran this project, which included our year round Festival of Ideas, for 31 years). www.bristolideas.co.uk.
And 16 October is my birthday so I know what my present to me will be.
‘Play for Today belonged to an era when writers and producers had more freedom to follow their instincts. And those creatives were lucky enough to have a captive audience.‘
Coming up 16 September. I’m interviewing Ian McEwan about his new book What We Can Know for @toppingsbath.bsky.social. Ian is always a joy to listen to and to interview. I’ve read an advance copy and it’s very good.
One of the good things about the UK is we don’t tax books. In Denmark you pay 25% tax on top of the price of the book. They are now dropping this to help address the reading crisis.
You can see Love @wshed.bsky.social this week and then the third part of he trilogy, Sex, from 29 August. The films are not connected so each can be watched individually. I hope to catch up with Dreams soon. Watershed is a cinema that excels in film exhibition and serious discussion about films.
This article is useful for wider discussions about dealing with difficult matter in film exhibition today (and hence useful for challenges facing other artforms currently). It also addresses problems in film distribution - Dreams is an example - as well as the lack of serious coverage of films:
It’s shocking and sad to see that the first film in the Oslo Stories trilogy Dreams has not done well. It ‘…opened in the UK two weeks ago and has grossed just £6,866 to date.’ This is the film that was the Berlinale 2025 Golden Bear-winner. I missed it as I was away.
Saw two films back to back about the search for love: The Materialists and Oslo Stories: Love. I didn’t like The Materialists that much - it seemed to want it all - but found Love to be very good, one of the best films of the year for me.
As a short Terence Stamp tribute watched The Limey and The Hit. Seen The Hit before and thought I had seen The Limey (but hadn’t). Two tight thrillers - both just under 100 minutes - with Stamp standing out in excellent casts. More films like this, please. youtu.be/vfWPKR21jV8. Next up Billy Budd.
Times five star review for Battleship Potemkin with music by the Pet Shop Boys: ‘…it works, and sometimes exquisitely so. The cleaned-up print and thumping score give Eisenstein an urgency and an emotional wallop that he hasn’t had in, well, 100 years.‘
In the late 1950s/ early 1960s Tom Stoppard worked on the Bristol Post and Western Daily Press. He wrote on Bristol, tennis, cricket, arts and motoring. He’s in two episodes of The Newcomers, which we’re showing 26 October with @swsilents.bsky.social and others. Details here ti.to/film-noir-uk...
While on the subject of #SilentFilm The Battle of the Somme (1916) with which we’re screening as part of the double bill (thanks to the IWM) we highly recommend this book as well… don’t forget to book your tickets tho: ti.to/film-noir-uk...
Here’s the British cover.
Looking forward to reading this very much. I have shelf of Matthiessen’s books and have wanted to know more about his life for a long time.
Current reading - second reading for me - of Cobb’s superb novel about the First World War (which he fought in). I’m introducing Kubrick’s brilliant film of the book and the silent Battle of the Somme 22 November for @swsilents.bsky.social: www.southwestsilents.com/event-detail...
‘Pocock’s rage is infectious and energising; her prose vivid. In unexpected places she finds kindness and generosity. There is both darkness and brilliance here: affection and laughter brighten the pages of this fierce, accusatory, tender and unforgettable book.’
Started @joannapocock.bsky.social new book yesterday when it arrived as part of my @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social subscription. Finished it today. It’s a terrific work. I wish we still had our Festival of the Future City as we could have arranged a whole programme round this.
‘The result is the fullest portrait yet of how Baldwin’s romantic pursuits fed his creative ones, and the first significant biography of Baldwin to be released by a major publisher in years.’ Out in the UK next spring.
In the late 1950s/ early 1960s Tom Stoppard worked on the Bristol Post and Western Daily Press. He wrote on Bristol, tennis, cricket, arts and motoring. He’s in two episodes of The Newcomers, which we’re showing 26 October with @swsilents.bsky.social and others. Details here ti.to/film-noir-uk...
‘Deeply researched and masterfully told…a definitive account of how race, risk and exploitative real estate have shaped the American city. The epidemic of landlord arson may have receded, Ansfield reminds us, “yet its source - the lethal alchemy of race and capitalism - endures.”’
‘Three cheers…for Channel 5’s bold move to bring back Play for Today, more than 40 years after it left our screens in 1984. The channel has announced it will revive the brand from early next year, with an emphasis on the social realism that was an important feature of the original series.’
Want to see what Bristol looked like in 1964? That year the city was the centre of a six-part TV series that launched BBC2. We’re showing the complete The Newcomers and John Boorman’s revisit to Bristol 21 years later 26 October. Book here: ti.to/film-noir-uk...
‘Boggs has produced a stunning book…The reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched and the voice that will not be suppressed.’ Out in the US now; out in UK Spring 2026.
Just launched with @swsilents.bsky.social and others. Celebrate the relationship between John Boorman and Bristol with a screening of the BBC's The Newcomers (1964) and his visit to Bristol 20 years later with Money Into Light. 26/10/2025 Bristol Megascreen, 12pm: ti.to/film-noir-uk...
I will need to use this archive soon for research on BBC in the 1960s. It should be open to all researchers. I have signed this. Please sign and share.
Coming up 27 August. A special @slapstickfest.bsky.social event and fundraiser: John Cleese on Fawlty Towers at 50. Book here: www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk/whats-on/faw...
Play for Today was an essential part of my growing up. It was a cultural experience which has stayed with me. It was good for casts and crews. Good for Channel 5 to do this. But what is the BBC playing at? They should be doing this.
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris: the entrance to Sargent's Studio, 1906-07 oil on canvas Ashmolean
‘Hollywood devours its own and has no respect for its past.’
Last night’s film treat was Grand Hotel now back on BBC and on iPlayer. Pre-code, remarkable cast, tight writing and direction. Just under two hours of film joy.
Casperis at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.
Louis Menand reviews new biography of James Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs in The New Yorker. The collection on Baldwin I edited last year for @writersmosaic.bsky.social is available here: writersmosaic.org.uk/content/goin...
Tortoise The Martin Brothers Salt-glazed stoneware, dated 1898 'Wally Bird' tobacco jar The Martin Brothers Salt-glazed stoneware, dated 1898 In Ashmolean, Oxford
Also saw Savages about the destruction of land, animals and people for palm oil. It’s very good stop-motion animation tells the story brilliantly. I avoid palm oil. When Bristol was 2015 European Green Capital I suggested a big campaign in the city about palm oil. It wasn’t picked up.
Saw this @wshed.bsky.social. It’s a powerful story about a universal problem: not enough nurses and those that are employed are overworked. My wife spent 10 days in hospital recently. One of the very good student nurses said she had been told the NHS might not have work for her on graduation.
Very orange sky in Bath tonight as I walked home. Even more orange than this photo shows.
‘The saga shows, one literary agent says, “the story of publishing … that the author, the person, the freelancers, the unsecured people, are the ones who get paid last.”’ I subscribed to Unbound books on the understanding I was supporting writers. What a shoddy affair this is.
Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley has died aged 91. She is the subject of I think, one of the best ever FT lunches, which you can read here (registration or subscription required, will post a first 300 clicks free link in the replies):
Rereading some of Ian McEwan’s work in preparation for interviewing him for @toppingsbath.bsky.social 16 September. Book here: www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/...
This - and the one on Sesame Street (see feed) - are my favourite stories from today’s NYT.
‘Through its aesthetics, the show is grounded in reality; and through its messaging, it portrays a vision of how urban life can be. It’s a block where residents of all backgrounds and varying income levels exist together harmoniously and where local businesses thrive.’
‘If his friends hadn’t stepped in at the right time, and taken him off to Bristol and to his future meeting with William Wordsworth, it is entirely possible his genius would never have revealed itself, and that his depression and laudanum addiction could have led to a very different fate.‘
‘Our great-grandparents did in a week what we now do in a day. So why are we still working the same hours?’
I’ve wanted a copy of this book - about one of my top 10 films - for years. Long out of print. Those who own a copy must treasure it greatly as it comes up for sale rarely, and at a high cost. Very limited print runs of new edition available from eBay. I’m hoping to do the walking tour one day.
John Bratby (1928-1992) Gloria with Angst 1960 Laing, Newcastle
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) Acetylene Welding, part of 'The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Ideals' print series 1917 In Laing Newcastle exhibition.
Wandering along the Newcastle Quayside on a nice evening.
Looking forward to @illuminations.bsky.social new book, out next January. Preorder here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/magic-ray...
Lots of treats @cineredis.bsky.social at Watershed. Saw a brilliant documentary on Henry Fonda this morning and now about to see Young Mr Lincoln.
Here’s Stephen Frears, writer Hanif Kureishi, actor Gordon Warnecke and curator Mark Cosgrove at last night’s 40th anniversary showing of My Beautiful Laundrette @cineredis.bsky.social.
Charles Hazlewood introducing last night’s @cineredis.bsky.social showing of Amadeus. This is a film which passes the test of time. I loved it (again).
Many congratulations to @wildtwin.bsky.social for this award. If you haven’t discovered Jeff’s work yet you’re in for a treat. If you want a taster, here’s the piece Jeff write for us on cinema-going www.bristolideas.co.uk/read/ghost-c....
This is interesting. A new book about Prichard, important in Bristol’s history, a supporter of abolition and for the humane treatment of mentally ill people, amongst many other things. www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...
Latest purchase. From 1962 (I think) a collection of poetry from Bristol poets. Also includes a leaflet for a new magazine, though not in Bristol (now in search of this).
