If Paul Rotha was going to be fired, he was going to be fired by the best. In the early years of his career, while working as an assistant designer for Hitchcock, Rotha published a scathing article on the stagnation of British film. The future master of suspense was not impressed. Hitchcock canned Ro
If Britain had a blacklist during the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he couldn't persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of the 1984 coal miners' strike was banned outright. Why? Loach
E.M. Forster once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and his friends, he hoped he'd have the courage to betray the former. This preference for personal loyalty over patriotism reveals the core of Forster's values, the liberalism that he brought to his fictional explorations o
Dickens saw London with dirty eyes. Colored by the Industrial Revolution's residual grime, his vision was thick with haze and factory smoke. He portrayed London's hovels, its drinking dens and shipyards, lodging houses and debtors' prisons, with hard-won insight. The author crept through London's