Before he was a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer. And he never lost his interest in photography. I remember Keith Hamshere, the first boy to play Oliver Twist in Oliver! and later a leading Hollywood stills photographer, saying he learnt to keep out of Kubrick's eyeline if he was on set during one of his films. If he didn't, Kubrick would notice him and say something like "Is that a new lens? How are you finding it?", the film suddenly forgotten.
Long ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here. I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. Victorians, modesty and table legs The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of ...
We are moving inexorably towards polling day. So here's a short round up of what I've been doing. On Saturday I was in Ryton delivering leaflets aimed at squeezing what's left of the collapsing Labour vote. On Sunday there was an action day in Dunston Hill and Whickham East. I was there to help deliver Focus leaflets. Monday may well have been a bank holiday but I was delivering Focuses in
It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that he was too:Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang - if he had chosen to join MI6. The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni. But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion - who believe in ...
"Harold Wilson: The Winner" by Nick Thomas-Symonds is an excellent biography which, to a large degree, resets the reputation of Wilson with a skilled degree of fairness and precision. Previous accounts have painted him as a manipulative fixer – often working out the lowest common denominator in any situation to find a way to muddle forward. Thomas-Symonds, with access to more documents than were previously available, gives us a picture of a decent, honourable man who was also very clever. His concern for the under-privileged and for issues such as race and gender equality shine through his work. He retained ...
We do not have elections in Liverpool this year, so we have been helping out in a range of councils that are not too far away with some of our people out in London for the rest of the week. What is clear is that both Labour and Conservative Parties are going to get hammered this Thursday. The polls all conclude that there will be massive losses for them both, with the only disagreement being the exact extent of those losses. We do not have to rely on polls, however because all that they are indicating is the trend which ...
The Mirror reports that Reform UK's campaign in Wales has descended into infighting after an election candidate said a social media post by prominent party member Arron Banks was racist. The paper says that James Evans, a candidate for Reform, has now become the first party figure to brand comments by key Reform supporter, Arron Banks as racist after the Brexit bankroller prompted a furious reaction from opponents after writing "Welsh lad?" in response to a clip posted on X featuring a Black activist campaigning for Plaid Cymru on Monday. This row though pales in comparison to the new policy ...
Here's the late great Dame Maggie Smith being interviewed by Mark Lawson in 2017. They talk about Alan Bennett, the fame brought by Downton Abbey and the awfulness of waiting on a Harry Potter set in a silly hat. I remember a remark by David Hemmings to the effect that anyone can learn to act, the harder thing is learning to wait.
The latest edition of Miranda Sawyer's Talk '90s To Me podcast is well worth a listen. It provides a history of the changes that took place through the decade both in people's taste for drink and in the economics of the pub trade. Peter Brown is a well-informed guest. As to the panic over children and alcopops, it was largely unfounded. They were expensive, and as underage drinkers take it up because they want to look more adult, a product that was packaged like a children's drink didn't attract them anyway. I remember alcopops as a good after-work drink before ...
". . . .a world suffering from 'global warming and environmental degradation, multiple conflicts, rising military budgets, disregard for international law and international humanitarian law, disruptions to trade, erosion of democratic governance and technological developments that are met with excitement and fear.' " This quotation from a speech by Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, Brazil's ambassador to the UK, forms the opening of a full page article by the Guardian's diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour in last Saturday's paper. It seems to be a pretty god description of the world we're in. Wintour's article is headlined "Hope emerges from chaos." It wold ...
"The taboo around the word 'membership' has been maintained not by principle but timidity. Farage built his project on lies. The least we can do is have the courage to tell the truth about what those lies have cost us in our classrooms, laboratories, training colleges, concert halls, and our standing in a world that badly needs Britain to be more than a bystander."Caroline Lucas goes where Certain Other Politicians fear to tread. Barry Gardiner points to an important lesson of the Mandelson affair: "Most leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they think they want to hear. ...
The Guardian reports that Britain's biometrics watchdogs have warned that national oversight of AI-powered face scanning to catch criminals is lagging far behind the technology's rapid growth. The paper says that with the Metropolitan police almost doubling the number of faces they scan in London over the past 12 months and a rising use of the technology by retailers in the UK, Professor William Webster, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, said that the "slow pace of legislation was trying to catch up with the real world" and "the horse had gone before the cart": Dr Brian Plastow, who ...