Jan. 8th, 2006

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- but anyone who cares for good acting and production could not afford to miss the re-run of THE GATHERING STORM, the BBC's bio-pic about Winston Churchill before the war. Sir Albert Finney virtually resurrects Winston Churchill, Vanessa Redgrave (of all people!) is sublime as Clementine, their depiction of a crotchety but loving old married couple is marvellous, and they are surrounded by a supporting cast that many studios in Hollywood would kill for - Ronnie Barker, Linus Roache, Jim Broadbent, Tom Wilkinson, Derek Jacobi, Celia Imrie. I am watching it as I write, and it is breathtaking.
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1. Leave a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I'll reply and give you five questions to answer.
3. You'll update your LJ with the questions answered.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You ask other people questions when they want to be interviewed. And it just keeps going, and going, and going....



1. Is there a particular work (book, song, play, poem, painting, anything vaguely creative) that you can say has influenced you in your life?
2. Are you a day bird or a night owl?
3. How far do you resemble your star sign, if at all, regardless of whether you believe in astrology or not?
4. Is there any one ambition that you can single out which you want to achieve, over and above all the others?
5. Rice Krispies chocolate cakes... good or bad? :p

1. Oh my goodness... many, many. The work of Georges Dumezil, the greatest historian in the twentieth century, determined the direction of my own research; and that of generations of great comics artists, a mountain range crowned by the titanic peaks of Jack Kirby and Hayao Miyazaki, made me a cartoonist. Then there are the great classical musicians: Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi, Mozart, Bach, Haendel, Rossini, Pergolesi, Vivaldi, Palestrina and so on and so forth and so following. Popular music: Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Francesco Guccini, Edith Piaf. Movies... Oh my God, where do I begin? And then Keats, Virgil, Dante (the greatest poet I ever read), Goethe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dr.Johnson, Sappho, Aeschylus, Homer, Thomas Mann, Kalidasa, Horace, Rabindranath Tagore.... I do not think that there is a place at which I can stop. I have read and seen and listened to and watched many, many things that I have loved, and I have learned from everything I have loved. And yes, there were Cathy, Ruth, Clare and Debbie, too. They do not count as works of art, except of course from God's hand, but they taught me what life was about.

2. Hard to tell. It depends on how much I ate the previous day, really.

3. Quite a bit, especially if you take in the Chinese year system. I was born in the month of the Lion of the year of the Tiger. Figures, does it not?

4. Depends what you mean. That I would like to achieve and think I can: to become well known as a historian (preferably without prostituting my views or my professionality). That I dream of: to marry the woman I love.

5. Good: for the taste. And bad: they probably have the nutritional value of dirty water.

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