Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... for the film was written by the poet and communist Montagu Slater, who wrote the libretto for Peter Grimes and worked with Auden on John Grierson documentaries such as Coal Face. Elisabeth Lutyens composed the music. She supplemented her income from writing orchestral and chamber music by creating scores for horror films and her skills in melodrama came ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... associates denied that psychoanalysis had anything to do with politics. In a letter to Ernest Jones, the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Anna Freud wrote that her father couldn’t ‘wait to get rid of’ Reich. ‘What my father finds offensive in Reich,’ she explained, ‘is the fact that he has forced psychoanalysis to ...

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

... no need sometimes for the deity to draw attention to himself so obviously. It had something of St Peter and the cock crowing thrice about it, not an incident Father Jolliffe was particularly fond of as it showed Jesus up as a bit of an ‘I told you so’, which on the quiet the priest felt he sometimes was anyway. Today, though, the intervention of the clock ...