Macbeth is William Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, written between 1603 and 1607. The play contains many of the Bard’s most famous and usually ill-quoted lines, such as “Bubble, bubble”…
Category: History of the Cinema
Lancastrians and Yorkists
There is more to the intense rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire than mere cricket, though one has to admit that these two large northern English counties seem to…
SPAIN: from black comedy to farce
Not even the Monty Python team could have invented the present situation in the democracy with a monarchy, Parliament, and civilized population called Spain. The Marx Brothers…
The Percy family, marching with English history
This is more usually a first or Christian name, and sometimes encourages unfair laughter: “Come on Percy, show ‘em wot you got!” As a surname or family…
Cinematic car chases
There are second-unit directors whose speciality is the car chase. These are usually urban, but the countryside has also seen some hair-raising examples. I have chosen two of…
The Home Guard (a.k.a.Dad’s Army)
Thanks to a BBC-made TV series stretching from the early Sixties to the late Seventies, a phenomenon from the Second War has become memorable. The series was…
Archers and Archery
An archer was a soldier, usually professional, armed with a bow and a quiver full of arrows. It would be difficult to estimate how long this lethal weapon…
Monks, Friars & Orders
Men who renounced a worldly life in order to enter a monastery were many in medieval times. They are few and far between now, but the three most…
The Intelligence Services
Where dictators or democratically elected governments rule, they need organisations dedicated to the gathering and evaluation of information, mainly concerning the intentions of other states that may not…
Child Stars & what happened to some of them
Since cinema started small children with the talent (and courage) to act in front of a camera team have been popular with cinemagoers. In the Twenties Mary Pickford…