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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.

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?

Making a Monkey out of Darwin

When Darwin finally published the On the Origin of Species, he tried to avoid controversy by ignoring human origins. Yet evolution was soon being attacked as the godless ‘monkey theory’.

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.

Connected Nature

The story of the deep, biogeophysical planetary connections and how these are intensifying the effects of climate change and economic development, is told through personal research and expeditions to remote locations across the world (including some that were previously unexplored).

John Evelyn: Britain’s First Environmentalist

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.

Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t

The Windrush Thinkers and Artists

London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.

Darwin, Breeding and Barnacles

Following the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled down to a quiet married life, relying on correspondence to gather facts. He wrote thousands of letters as he gathered facts to support his still-secret theory.

Offensive Shakespeare

From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it’s easy to see how Shakespeare’s plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespeare changed over time?

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