The kids love museums!

My Stories of the World feature has appeared in Museums Journal but it's behind a paywall so no link is possible. Museums are exciting for most people over 30 but if they connect with young people that's really something to shout about. I was pleased with this article because it shows why worthy is not so dull - this is the way we inch ahead as a society.

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Stories of the World

Just wrote this for Untold London - lovely, Big Society-ish youth participation project in museums. More to come. Journeys into Diversity at London Transport Museum

The Truth About Stanley

The Truth About Stanley is a short drama made to raise money for homelessness. My partner Tom Clark produced it and I did the PR. We managed to get it on the front page of guardian.co.uk, and covered in the news section of The Observer. It also got a five star review in the Independent on Sunday - an unprecedented achievement for a short film. Saba Salman compares Stanley to Cathy Come Home on her blog, The Social Issue. But the wonderful Cathy is in the realist tradition, the filmic equivalent of a Zola novel about coalminers. The homelessness was triggered by bad luck and a bad system - a work injury and no safety nets. Stanley is much more psychological. It looks at why people choose a life on the streets. It is a film for this age of the mind, where we have virtual lives on the internet, neuroscience is revealing the potential of our brains in old age, and charities like Kidsco reach right into the psyches of traumatised children. I believe Sta...

Face to face with a great feminist

I'm interviewing academics at the University of East London for a research brochure. The other day I met someone called Barbara Taylor. "So what's the real world impact of your book going to be?" I asked chirpily. "Well, it's going to be published by Penguin," she replies. "It's about mental health, a mixture of historical study and memoir as I've spent three years researching the asylum system, and I was in Friern Barnet hospital in the 1980s. Books like that tend to attract a lot of attention." She's only The Barbara Taylor - world famous historian of feminism! Actually I've never heard of her, but one has a way of noticing when one is the presence of brilliance and a quick google afterwards confirmed I had been. The book is about how we look after each other - everyone needs looking after, mental health is just one example of that. She says that question is nothing new, it's always been a preoccupation of feminism. But th...

Varya Shaw

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