What a pleasure to see a truly commercial film which dares to makes its deepest points with allegory. I am thinking of Seraphim Falls (2006). It’s currently viewable on BBC iPLayer.
It’s a story of how two tough mens’ paths tragically cross in the American Civil War resulting in the quest for revenge by one of them. It’s
Until this morning, the last time I saw a haymaker using a scythe and making ricks was in the Fifties when I was a child in East Kent.
But there the reaper was today as the sun rose, on the Green in the Oxford parish where I live.
‘It’s easier to cut when it’s still wet with dew,’ he told
I take photographs continually and they become a visual reference for things done, seen and thought. It takes a while for some thoughts to emerge, others to recede and the images to find their place.
Sometimes one or other lingers on the edge of my mind like a disturbance caught in peripheral vision whose nature and
The new Insight Guide Travel Photography How to take striking images (ed. Tony Halliday) is on object lesson to other publishers and their editors in how to produce a great, readable, perusable instructional book.
For some bizarre reason such books are often the opposite of what you’d expect for a visual and exciting subject with very
Many readers, writers and publishers have been thinking this week about the lengthening shadow the arrival of e-books is casting over printed books. I know I have, wondering if my shelf of the books I’ve written is history. That’s because the latest – the iPad from Apple – has just been launched; while Kindle, the Amazon version, is doing well
A RISING MOON over Christ Church Meadow brought the very successful 2010 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival to a memorable end yesterday.
The great thing about literary festivals these days is that they are no longer just about ‘literature’ or dominated but the literary establishment. Rather the opposite. Their programmes now are celebrations of great ideas and current controversies which offer… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG
I FOUND myself the other night a sleepless guest in a house with a great deal of ambient nocturnal light. It came from two high street lamps, neighbours’ security lights and a lot of passing traffic …
My friend’s glazed front door was simply astonishing, a glowing blaze of fiery light which I found hypnotic. Sleepless as I was… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG
IT’S AN AWE-INSPIRING business witnessing one of Britain’s premier orchestras recording a major new work by a living composer. But there I was last week in Cardiff, at the BBC’s HQ adjacent to the Millennium Centre, with a select audience of five people, watching the 75-member BBC National Orchestra record Adrian William’s magisterial and profoundly moving new Cello Concerto… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG
‘Wow!’ you say and want to stop the car and grab your camera and capture the uncatchable – an extraordinary sunset just across that field, past those leafless trees, out over the far beyond of the chalk downland you’re driving across, so striking it seems despite all that to be almost within reach.
So you speed up a bit, look for a lay-by… CLICK FOR FULL BLOG
You have to look hard for colour in the landscape at the moment, even on sunny days. But on drab, drear ones, when the chill factor drags the heartiest walker down, the search becomes nearly pointless. In the snow, which we still have, even more so.
But soon Lesser Celandine will be a bright exception. Last year, when my photograph was
