Currently Browsing: Peter Lawson 3 articles
A Very Anglicised Jew: Tom Stoppard
Peter Lawson reviews Hermione Lee’s newly published authorised biography of Tom Stoppard It’s a long haul reading Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2020). There are 865 pages of text, excluding the bibliography and endnotes. It has to be said Lee has done a thorough job. This […]
Churchill and Alexander Korda
Peter Lawson finds flaws in the fascinating documentary Churchill and the Movie Mogul A fascinating documentary about Hungarian-Jewish émigré director, Alexander Korda (1893-1956), was screened on 25 September on BBC4. (It is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Titled Churchill and the Movie Mogul, it relates the relationship between Korda and Churchill from the […]
How has the pandemic affected how we think about British Jewish culture?
On the one hand, the stress during the pandemic has been on the ‘British’ in British-Jewish culture. Locked-down, quarantined, forbidden from travelling abroad, we find ourselves re-connecting with the local, the places we actually inhabit rather than ‘diasporas of the mind’ (the title of Bryan Cheyette’s 2013 book on ‘Jewish and postcolonial writing’). Diasporic we may be, but cultural diasporas are largely imaginary constructions, ‘imaginary homelands’ […]