Trivia

Film historian, author and academic.

His first published film essay was an examination of the themes of sex, money, death, and compulsion in Psycho (1960).

He earned a degree in English at Cambridge, and started out teaching at secondary schools in the UK and France. At one school, he started a film club and encouraged students to write their own reviews.

As a child, he enjoyed Hollywood comedies starring Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, and Cary Grant.

He always acknowledged the influence of the famous literary critic and academic F.R. Leavis upon his writing, although Leavis was famously uninterested in (and even sometimes antagonistic towards) the cinema.