Entertaining Miss Sloane

I've just finished an exhilarating Q & A for BAFTA with the writer, director, producers and stars of the excellent political thriller Miss Sloan, at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles. My director hero John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) gave the movie a cracking pace and Jessica Chastain and Gugu Mbatha-Raw lit up the screen as a couple of stop-at-nothing Washington lobbyists....

More insights into 1946 from David Kynaston (Austerity Britain)

“Britain in 1945. A land of orderly cues, hat doffing men walking on the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and children, censored books, censored films, censored place, infinite repression of desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a lifetime sentence …  Marriage is seldom companionable, with husbands and wives living in separate, self-contained spheres, the husband often not telling the wife how much she earned … Children in the street to act off by strangers, children in the...

Punch welcomes in the New Year

This is the first Punch cartoon Forrester saw in 1946. It depicts, rather movingly I think, Father Time saying farewell to the terrible year of 1945. But it wasn't long before 1946 brought its own tribulations, notably in the form of America's reluctance, now the war was won, to loan Britain the money to keep going. One result was a shortage of consumer goods - exemplified by this cartoon of a shop with not VERY much to sell ...

I don’t like to be alarmist but …

Progress at the airport!

Some of you may remember my video diary last month urging Santa Monica City Council to remove as soon as possible the parked planes from the part of Santa Monica Airport to make way for a park. This is what the first 6 acres looked like not long after the video, as photographed by my friend and fellow campaigner Michael Brodsky. Here's Michael's picture of what the same 6 acres looks like today. Bravo our council, plus Rick Cole and Nelson Hernandez! And here's what I'd personally like to see when park designer Mark Rios...