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Could Streaming Change the ‘Classic Film’ Canon?

Cinema’s original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises.

Mathematical Structure in Fiction

Mathematical concepts have often been used to create new structural forms in fiction, as in the works of Raymond Queneau and Jorge Luis Borges.

Crime in Fiction: Defoe and Dickens to Spark, Highsmith and McEwan

Why did stories of criminals become irresistible for novelists? Starting...

Giotto and the Early Italian Renaissance

Italo-Byzantine art will be considered as background to the early or ‘proto’ Renaissance at a time when Italy was a focus of stylistic cross-currents from South, East and Northern Europe.

Far From Hollywood: New Kinds of Classic Film

Canons of taste and value in other media, such as literature, art and music, have been challenged in recent decades by proponents of sexual and ethnic equality.

Mathematical Journeys into Fictional Worlds

Literary satire has long used mathematical concepts to reinforce its points.

What Makes a Film Classic?

For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound.

Amelia Dyer: Baby Killers

Amelia Dyer was one of the most prolific murderers in Victorian Britain. She made a living as a “baby farmer”, or someone paid to care for unwanted or abandoned infants – except she killed around 400 of them. How could a mother and nurse murder so many defenceless babies?

Christmas Lies and Legends

Is Santa really Dutch? Were Christmas Trees introduced by Prince Albert? Was Christmas once a time of faith, rather than riotous feasting?

Snow White: Evil Witches

The Brothers Grimm’s tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White’s malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult.

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