Showing posts with label Powell and Pressburger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Powell and Pressburger. Show all posts

Six of the Best 600

Allison Keyes on a rediscovered manuscript that casts light on the Tulsa massacre of 1921 - an attack on a thriving Black neighbourhood.

Alexandra Lange contrasts the reactions to Garden Bridge and Pier 55 - "Two cities, one designer and one strategy – to build a privately funded park above a river."

"Thanks to my older brother, I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee." Ian Jack reviews a new life of the paper's editor David Astor.

"[Jack] Cardiff achieved many of the visual effects in camera by drawing inspiration from the use of light and colour by such artists as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh." David Parkinson looks back at Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus.

"One of the reasons I can’t stand United is the air of sanctimony that hovers over the club. If Mourinho takes them back to the summit it ought to puncture that – it’ll show they’re no better than anyone else, just another plaything for the great man’s ego." David Runciman is right about Jose's re-emergence at Old Trafford.

The Beauty of Transport celebrates Tynemouth Station.
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Six of the Best 594

"People who are not very bright have this terrible tendency to pick a side in major intractable geopolitical conflicts, and support it as if it was a football team." Dan Davies offers a fair-minded account of Labour's problem with antisemitism.

John Blake puts Ken Livingstone right on Hitler and Zionism.

"The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force." David Conn on the lessons of Hillsborough and the longest inquest in British legal history.

The Shropshire Star collects local residents' memories of the filming of Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth in 1949: "I shall never forget Jennifer Jones’ feet. She did all the running up Pontesford Hill and up to the Devil’s Chair in bare feet, and her feet were bleeding. She was absolutely brilliant, a lovely looking girl."

James Curry remembers his grandfather, the Revd J.P. Martin, who wrote the immortal Uncle books.

Adam Gopnik reviews a new biography of Paul McCartney.
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Sheila Sim 1922-2016



The actress Sheila Sim died yesterday at the age of 93.

As long as there are awkwardly romantic Englishmen she will be remembered as the star of A Canterbury Tale.

The photograph above shows her wedding to Richard Attenborough in 1945.
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Ironic Tweet of the Year

It was Sunday 26 July. I was staying in Canterbury and had been down to Hastings to see Liberator's Stewart Rayment and family.

Waiting at Ashford for my last train of the day, I sent this tweet:


Lovers of the film A Canterbury Tale will recognise the reference. The action of the film is set in motion when Sergeant John Sweet (US Army) mistakenly gets off his train at the station before the city.

Shortly afterwards the Canterbury train arrived, I caught it and then this happened and I had to get off before Canterbury...


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