Videography

Short video for The Woolf Institute 25th-anniversary. 

Spitting Image revived a long tradition of lampooning the Royal Family. Dr Sean Lang discusses the history of satirising the Royal Family, how it has changed over centuries, and how the makers of Spitting Image put their own spin on it.

Samurai are a well-known image of Japan, but they are as much legend as history. Our Samurai: History and Legend exhibition explores the literary concept of the samurai and the changing nature of Japanese warrior culture from the 12th to the 19th centuries.

James Fleming discussing the stories that inspired Bond Behind the Iron Curtain. This is the first of three clips of the author talking about his book, starting with the full-page review in May 1962 of the Dr No film. This appeared in Izvestiya, the top Russian daily newspaper and marked the beginning of the communist campaign against Bond.

Isaac Newton's youthful experiments with sunlight and prisms established an entirely new basis for the understanding of light and colour. His manuscript collections in Cambridge University Library hold crucial clues to how he worked. This film uses this invaluable evidence to explore Newton's remarkable notebooks and experimental explorations at Cambridge and at his Lincolnshire home.

Sumerian clay tablet (MS Doc. 829) Zabala, southern Iraq, ca 2200 BCE MS Doc. 829 This diminutive clay tablet was written by a Sumerian scribe in an administrative office around 2200 BC. The full translation of the laconic text runs as follows: 18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe. 4th year 10th month.

Codex Zacynthius MS Add.10062, held by Cambridge University Library, is a palimpsest manuscript of the Greek New Testament. In the summer of 2018, it underwent multi-spectral imaging in order to recover the erased undertext as part of a larger project to create a new digital edition of the entire manuscript. This video shows the imaging work of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) and the University of Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, and introduces the scholarly project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing in the University of Birmingham. SFB 950 “Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe” is sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is part of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg

An introduction to the printing of books as it would have been done in the fifteenth century. The film uses equipment in the University Library's Historical Printing Room, and the printers are University Library staff members Nick Smith and Colin Clarkson.

Dr Andrew Cunningham talks about the iconic frontispiece to the "De humani corporis fabrica libri septem" by Andreas Vesalius, published in 1543. This accompanies a virtual exhibition to mark 500 years since the birth of Vesalius, whose work transformed the study of anatomy.

Mark Nicholls and John Wells, curators of the Library’s exhibition ‘A damned serious business: Waterloo 1815, the battle and its books’, give an overview of the display and highlight some of the items on show.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Benjamin Britten 18 - 20 February West Road Concert Hall.

Set somewhere between hope, glory and the endless wasteland, hanging on to the dregs of a now pixelated American Dream, is Phyllis Nagy’s ludicrously epic The Strip.

The Fitzwilliam Museum Society invites you to its greatest and most invigorating art event of the year.