This week I ordered a copy of The Hammer Vampire Scrapbook by Wayne Kinsey. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m already fascinated by this page (one of a dozen made available as previews on the Peveril Publishing website, and which I hope they therefore won’t mind me replicating): It shows the signet ring David Peel wore as the Baron Meinster in The Brides of Dracula (1960): something I’d never previously noticed when watching the film. Checking back, I could see why. It isn’t very prominent. However, Peel certainly is wearing a signet ring in the film, and after revisiting it and some of its publ ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I delivered the annual joint British School at Rome / Institute of Classical studies lecture, on ‘Thinking about encroachment in the cities of the Roman west’. Alas for me, it was via Zoom rather than in Rome , but on the plus side that means it was recorded and you can watch it here! I am thrilled that they made the title slide purple for me, without me having said anything to suggest such a preference. The paper basically argues that encroachment happens in every society which recognises property-ownership, that it has become seen as characteristic of late antiquity bu ..read more

The BBC recently put the original TV serial of Quatermass and the Pit on iPlayer, so I grabbed the chance and watched it. I’ve seen the Hammer version so I knew the story, which is much the same here as in the film. But, obviously, the six-episode format here gave them more space to develop the characters and settings, and just to play things a little slower. I was quite surprised by how high the production values were for a piece of television made in the late 1950s. This is all well covered on the Wikipedia page, and included the use of film (rather than video) as a default format, a mixture ..read more