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Courtesy of StudioCanal

by James Cameron-wilson

I have always been aware of the 1969 British film A Touch of Love, but I knew relatively little about it other than it starred Sandy Dennis and Ian McKellen. The title is misleading, to say the least, and the author of its screenplay, Margaret Drabble, was not happy with it either – the title, that is. Neither was she wild about the American moniker, Thank You All Very Much. Neither really sums up the content or the tone of the film, which was adapted by Dame Margaret from her own 1965 novel The Millstone, the name of which the producers, horror tycoons Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, were none too happy with, either. Being a restored title as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection, it does though offer considerable historical merit and had a significant impact on changing the attitude and practices of the NHS.

To celebrate the release of A Touch of Love now available on Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital, we are giving away 2 Blu-Rays to 2 lucky winners!

Directed by Emmy award-winning director Waris Hussein and adapted by Margaret Drabble from her novel ‘The Millstone’. The film stars Oscar-winning actress Sandy Dennis (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and the eminent Sir Ian McKellen in his first significant film role.

Sandy Dennis stars as Rosamund, a student and daughter of emotionally distant parents. After her first sexual encounter with handsome television announcer George played by Ian McKellen, Rosamund discovers she’s pregnant. After her failed attempt to terminate the pregnancy, she decides to keep the baby, despite pressure from friends and relatives. Preparing herself for the indignities and isolation that being a single mother will bring, she is adamant about not revealing the identity of the father, realising that however much she may need a husband,...

This Drabble adaptation about a PhD student who gets pregnant is kitchen-sinky but without humour or even awareness. It’s an interesting curio

Waris Hussein’s earnest 1969 movie, adapted by Margaret Drabble from her own novel The Millstone, is a London-set drama about a young woman who has difficulties with men while researching a PhD in English literature – and as a result we get some tremendously nostalgic shots of the British Museum round reading room, when it was still a working library. American star Sandy Dennis puts on a stage-school English accent to play Rosamund, the graduate student who has well-to-do but insufferable bien pensant liberal parents, the kind of people who, as she explains to someone, “let the charlady sit down to dine with us, that kind of nonsense”.

Rosamund finds herself alone in her parents’ London flat while they are away doing good works in Africa and she exchanges brittle,...

On Sunday 5 January 2025, BBC Four broadcasts The Brontës Lived Here: Writers’ Houses!

Episode Summary

The upcoming episode of “The Brontës Lived Here: Writers’ Houses” promises to be an exciting journey into the world of one of literature’s most famous families. Margaret Drabble will take viewers to Haworth Parsonage, the historic home of the Brontë sisters. This location is not only significant for its connection to the family but also for its role in shaping their writing.

As the episode unfolds, Margaret will explore the Yorkshire Moors, a stunning landscape that inspired much of Emily Brontë’s work, including her classic novel, “Wuthering Heights.” The moors are known for their wild beauty, and Margaret will highlight how this dramatic setting influenced the themes and characters of the Brontë sisters’ stories.

Viewers can expect to learn more about the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, and how their experiences in Haworth shaped their writing.

Love & Friendship is an adaptation of young Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, believed to have been written in the mid 1790s but revised up to a fair copy prepared in 1805 and finally published by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1871.

Kate Beckinsale on Lady Susan:

“A new Jane Austen is quite a find, I think. It’s quite exciting to find something that people are not necessarily familiar with, either the trajectory of the story, or the characters.

“The thing about the Lady Susan Vernon character is that, unusually for romantic literature, at the core she’s not a very good person. And yet, she’s celebrated in the novella. It is extraordinarily well written and well observed and well drawn.

“This is an epistolary novel and it has its own difficulties in adapting. Lady Susan doesn’t have the same kind of reflection as Emma has, or self-analysis.

Bond movie wins film prize and BBC2's Twenty Twelve scoops comedy, while London 2012 cauldron takes visual arts gong

James Bond movie Skyfall, London Games comedy Twenty Twelve and the Olympic cauldron were among the winners at the 2013 South Bank Sky Arts awards.

The 23rd James Bond outing won the film prize at the awards ceremony, hosted by Lord Bragg in London at Tuesday lunchtime.

Continuing the Olympic theme, the visual arts award went to Thomas Heatherwick's London 2012 cauldron, while Twenty Twelve helped the BBC to a clean sweep in the TV categories, picking up the comedy prize.

Tom Stoppard's BBC2 adaptation of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End won the drama award, in an all-bbc shortlist also featuring Shakespeare adaptations The Hollow Crown and police thriller Line of Duty.

Tom Hiddleston picked up the Times breakthrough award for his acting in The Hollow Crown and films including War Horse and Avengers Assemble.

Actor known for his roles as clergymen, favourite uncles and tragic-comic characters

There is a great tradition in the rotundity of actors, and Roger Hammond, who has died aged 76 of cancer, stands proudly in a line stretching from Francis L Sullivan and Willoughby Goddard through to Roy Kinnear, Desmond Barrit and Richard Griffiths, though he was probably more malleably benevolent on stage than any of them.

He reeked of kindness, consideration and imperturbability, with a pleasant countenance and a beautiful, soft voice, qualities ideal for unimpeachable clergymen, favourite uncles and tragic-comic characters such as Waffles in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (whom he played in a 1991 BBC TV film, with David Warner and Ian Holm), a man whose wife left him for another man on his wedding day but who has remained faithful to her and forgiving ever since.

Hammond grew up in Stockport, Lancashire. His chartered accountant father was managing director of his own family firm,...

Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, screening at the Toronto film festival, is set to re-ignite Shakespearean conspiracy theories

Shakespearians often groan when the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory raises its head. But it often does, especially for those of us connected with Shakespeare's birthplace. Or perhaps you've chatted about the issue in taxis, on trains, or during long flights? Sometimes I hear "it doesn't matter, we still have the plays." The fact is it matters utterly, otherwise there would be no conspiracy theories in first place. And there would be no new film called Anonymous (from Roland Emmerich, the director of Godzilla and Independence Day) trying to insinuate itself into the popular imagination. Suddenly, those questions are going to be cropping up more often.

Anonymous will put over the view that the plays and poems should be attributed to the Earl of Oxford, a nominee first suggested by Thomas Looney (pronounced "Loney") in 1920. Let's get this straight.

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

Novelist Allison Pearson is the latest in a long line of high-profile women to talk publicly about their depression. All these women had pretty terrific lives – or that's how it looked from the outside. So what went wrong?

In 2002, Allison Pearson emerged as the chief chronicler of a very modern female malady: the crazed pursuit of the perfect life. Her novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, which started life as a column in the Daily Telegraph, told the story of that rarely sighted beast, a female hedge fund manager, and followed her struggle to juggle two children with her very full-time job. The protagonist, Kate Reddy, may have had a nanny and a husband who was both gainfully employed and nifty in the kitchen, but her life seemed full of comic anxieties. (The novel opened with her attempts to "distress" some Sainsbury's mince pies that her daughter was taking to school,...