How does a historian challenge the ‘misogynistic Monroe myth’ of lateness, drinking, and emotional fragility? Not by denying it, says Lucy Jane Santos, but by showing that memories can be faulty, stories retold and reshaped for their audience – and Marilyn’s own words are largely missing. And by remembering that history, like memory, is not […]
Nobody’s Perfect by Lucy Jane Santos
What happens when you bring together: a legendary director with a razor-sharp wit, a bombshell determined to prove she’s more than her appearance, a rising leading man hungry for his breakthrough, and an unflappable professional striving to keep everything together? Add a fiercely protective drama coach with a reputation at stake, a playwright under the […]
Magicians and film-makers, masters of illusions
Liz Hyder is enchanted by the magicians and film-makers of the 1890s, whose extraordinary inventions inspired her new novel, The Illusions, set at a time of great technological and social change. A few years ago, I went to the Wellcome Collection’s Smoke and Mirrors exhibition, which explored the psychology of magic. It was a feast […]
The Minister for Illusion: Goebbels and the German film industry
The German film industry was controlled by Joseph Goebbels from 1933 until his death in 1945. As Catherine Hokin found while researching her new novel, The Lost Mother, this extended further than dictating only the content of films. Joseph Goebbels had an eye for the importance of film, even before he was made Reich Minister […]