My Fair Lady won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1964, and picked up another seven: Best Director (George Cukor), Best Actor (Rex Harrison as Higgins), Best Cinematography (Harry Stradling), Best Sound, Best Adaptation or Treatment Score (André Previn), Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). Stanley Holloway and Gladys Cooper were ( Read more... )

I would normally give the second paragraph of the third scene, but the entire play has just one extended scene, so here is the opening section: The forenoon of the first of April, 1911 ( Read more... )

Somewhere around 1994 I did some research for my PhD in the archives of the Plunkett Foundation near Oxford, as its founder - Sir Horace Plunkett - was quite important to my topic. In the end I found his own diary of rather little use, but I did come across this excellent letter about him from George Bernard Shaw, written to Margaret Digby (who ( Read more... )

7) A Bachelor's London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte

This is the autobiography of Frederic Whyte (1867-1941), a distant cousin of mine who was active in the literary world of London in the quarter-century before the first world war. (Indeed, although the sub-title on the cover page of the book is "Memories of ( Read more... )