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Sweet, Matthew

June 4, 2018 by admin

WORK TITLE: Operation Chaos
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/2/1969
WEBSITE:
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British

RESEARCHER NOTES:

 

C control no.: nb 99163362
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nb99163362
HEADING: Sweet, Matthew
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670 __ |a The woman in white, 1999: |b t.p. (Matthew Sweet)
670 __ |a Psychosis and the sensation hero: |b t.p. (Matthew Sweet, St. Johns’ Coll.; D.Phil. thesis, Univ. of Oxford) authors’ declaration form (Matthew David Sweet, Fac. of English Lang. and Lit.)
670 __ |a The West End front, 2011: |b t.p. (Matthew Sweet) jkt. (Matthew Sweet presents Night Waves and Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio 4. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton babylon, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A brief history of fun, The age of excess, Truly madly cheaply and The rules of film noir)

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PERSONAL

Born December 2, 1969.

EDUCATION:

Attended the University of Oxford.

ADDRESS

  • Home - London, England.
  • Agent - Simon Trewin, WME Entertainment, 100 New Oxford St., London WC1A 1HB England.

CAREER

Writer, editor, columnist, critic, journalist, scriptwriter, television presenter, and actor. Independent on Sunday, film critic. Contributor to BBC Radio 4. The Culture Show: Me, You, and Doctor Who, presenter, 2013. Night Waves and Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3, presenter; The Film Programme, BBC Radio 4, presenter.

WRITINGS

  • (Editor and author of introduction and notes) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, Penguin (New York, NY),
  • Inventing the Victorians, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001
  • Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2005
  • The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2011
  • Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves, Henry Holt and Company (New York, NY), 2017

Contributor to newspapers and periodicals, including Guardian (London, England), Daily Telegraph (London, England), Intelligent Life, and Art Quarterly.

Scriptwriter for documentaries, television series, and films, including Checking into History, 2005; British Film Forever, 2007; Truly, Madly, Cheaply! British B. Movies, 2008; The Rules of Film Noir, 2011; Riverside Story, 2011; People Power and Puppetry, 2011; and Nice or Nasty?: The Making of Vengeance of Varos, 2012.

Appeared an a historian and expert in documentaries, television programs, and films. Author of a column for The Big Issue.

SIDELIGHTS

Matthew Sweet is a writer, editor, journalist, critic, historian, and scriptwriter. He has been a columnist for the publication The Big Issue and a film critic for the Independent on Sunday. He has also contributed work to BBC Radio 4, noted a writer on the Internet Movie Database. He is a prolific scriptwriter for television series and documentary programs, including the series Checking into History and standalone programs such as The Rules of Film Noir; Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B Movies; Silent Britain, and Riverside Story. He contributes journalistic pieces to newspapers and publications such as the London Guardian, London Telegraph, and Art Quarterly.

Sweet has also been a television program presenter and actor, appearing in dozens of television documentaries, panel shows, and documentary films. He frequently appears as an expert or historian in these programs. He presents programs on BBC Radio, including Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3 and The Philosopher’s Arms and the Film Programme on BBC Radio 4, noted a biographer on the William Morris Endeavor Clients website. Sweet is well known as an expert on the long-running British television science fiction series Doctor Who, and frequently writes and presents documentary material on the program. He has been a series consultant on the Showtime series Penny Dreadful.

Sweet served as editor of the 1999 reissue of the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White, one of the earliest examples of the mystery novel in literature. He provides a detailed introduction to the book and its origins as a serial in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, and examines Collins’s life and career. The book is “exquisitely uncomfortable. Sweet compares it to a Hitchcock film, and notes that it is rare for modern literature to engage the physical body as well as the mind,” commented Cynthia Ellis, writing in the Huffington Post.

Inventing the Victorians

In his book Inventing the Victorians, Sweet turns a critical eye on the reputation of the Victorian society of the late nineteenth century. Popular perception has it that the Victorians were stodgy, dreary in their way, embarrassed by sex, and so prudish that they went so far as to place cloaks or curtains over the legs of their pianos to avoid impropriety. Far from it, Sweet reports. He “argues in this lively book that the idea of the Victorians as tight-laced, repressed hypocrites is a myth,” commented Spectator contributor Jane Ridley. Sweet presents a compelling argument that “our modern culture is directly descended from their love of spectacle, sex and true crime stories,” remarked a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Instead of being backwards and uptight, Victorians enjoyed sex; they used drugs; they flocked to outrageous public spectacles and shows. The journalism of the age was innovative, and the sometimes macabre interests of the Victorians sometimes included the bizarre and unconventional, such as serial killers.

In Sweet’s view, “we have almost willfully developed a distorted idea” of how Victorians behaved so that we can “flatter ourselves with the belief that our own age is far more enlightened,” observed a Publishers Weekly contributor. Booklist writer Mary Carroll called Sweet’s book “Lively and provocative,” while a writer in M2 Best Books found it to be a “well-researched book that deftly punctures some of our time’s favourite ideas about the Victorians.”

Shepperton Babylon

Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema finds Sweet delving deeply into the history of British film. He has “taken it upon himself to track down and interview just about every living survivor of the 100-year-old British film industry” to produce his oral history, noted Gilbert Adair, writing in Spectator. “And what an extraordinary file of stories he has brought back from these lost worlds,” Adair further remarked. Sweet interviews participants both prominent and obscure, and uncovers stories of scandal, sex, drugs, and violence that would not be out of place in modern newspapers and gossip magazines. With the passage of time inexorably silencing the actors, directors, moguls, crewmembers, and others from the earliest days of British cinema, Sweet seeks to recover their life and career stories and make them available permanently.

“For as Sweet’s interest might be said to comprise the “secret” history of British cinema—its lost or forgotten stars, its arcana, bad moods and giddily dichotomous shifts of individual fortune—so there is a quality in his writing that manages to recreate the temper of this fallen world,” commented Michael Bracewell, writing in the Guardian (London). Adair concluded that the book’s strength lies in its “affectionate evocation of a vanished world and the strange and sleazy and rather wonderful characters who peopled that world.” A reviewer in the Independent (London) commented, “As an elegant dip into the lost past of British cinema, Shepperton Babylon changes the way we view our films—assuming we can ever see them again.”

 Operation Chaos

“Among the lesser-known effects of the Vietnam War was the desertion of a large number of American servicemen, many of whom made their way to Sweden,” commented a Kirkus Reviews writer. Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves is Sweet’s examination of this phenomenon and its reasons. He also explores the titular Operation Chaos, the CIA operation established to spy on these deserters in their new home. Sweet gives a detailed assessment of the reasons why a thousand or more soldiers fled to Sweden, and at the same time, “evocatively sketches his quest to uncover these resisters’ lives,” noted a Publishers Weekly writer. Some were antiwar; others were interested in self-preservation, while others had motivations that could be said to stem from mental illness.

Sweet describes how he found many of these soldiers in their later lives and the interviews he conducted with them. He gives readers a detailed glimpse into the counterculture of the time as it was lived by the soldiers and as it affected their decision to desert, despite the potential for harsh penalties. Surprisingly, Sweet found that some of the men were still feeling the effects of their wartime decisions in the present day, many living in fear of being found and arrested by the CIA. In a Booklist review, David Pitt called the book a “surprising, tragic, and, in many places, angry story of a country’s paranoia inflicting itself upon its own citizens.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

  • Booklist, December 1, 2001, Mary Carroll, review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 627; January 1, 2018, David Pitt, review of Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves, p. 35.

  • Contemporary Review, April, 2002, review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 255.

  • Express, November 11, 2011, Christopher Silvester, review of The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels.

  • Financial Times, November 4, 2011, Carl Wilkinson, review of The West End Front.

  • Guardian (London, England), December 2, 2001, David Jays, review of Inventing the Victorians; April 2, 2005, Michael Bracewell, review of Shepperton Babylon; December 9, 2011, Andrew Motion, review of The West End Front; February 21, 2018, Andrew Brown, review of Operation Chaos.

  • Independent (London, England), February 13, 2005, review of Shepperton Babylon; November 4, 2011, Marianne Brace, review of The West End Front.

  • Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2001, review of Inventing the Victorians; February 1, 2018, review of Operation Chaos.

  • Library Journal, December, 2001, Nigel Tappin, review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 147.

  • M2 Best Books, June 19, 2003, review of Inventing the Victorians.

  • Mail on Sunday, January 30, 2005, Roger Lewis, review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 75; March 5, 2006, Simon Shaw, review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 66.

  • Moving Image, spring, 2006, Aubry Anne D’Arminio, review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 131.

  • New Criterion, May, 2002, Alexandra Mullen, “Step Right Up,” review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 76.

  • New Statesman, November 5, 2001, Kathryn Hughes, “Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest,” review of Reinventing the Victorians, p. 51; February 1, 2005, Christopher Bray, “Love Letter,” review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 52.

  • New Yorker, May 14, 2018, review of Operation Chaos.

  • Observer (London, England), February 12, 2006, Sarah Castleton, review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 27.

  • Publishers Weekly, November 12, 2001, review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 50; November 27, 2017, review of Operation Chaos, p. 50.

  • Spectator, November 17, 2001, Jane Ridley, review of Inventing the Victorians, p. 48; February 26, 2005, Gilbert Adair, “Typically, Touchingly British,” review of Shepperton Babylon, p. 42; December 3, 2011, Mark Mason, “The Ritz in the Blitz,” review of The West End front, p. 45.

  • Telegraph (London, England), February 6, 2005, J.G. Ballard, review of Shepperton Babylon.

  • Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2018, Jeff Baker, review of Operation Chaos.

ONLINE

  • Arts Desk, https://www.theartsdesk.com/ (March 11, 2018), Jasper Rees, review of Operation Chaos.

  • Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (November 4, 2010), Cynthia Ellis, “Penguin Re-Releases The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins,” review of The Woman in White.

  • Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/ (July 17, 2018), filmography of Matthew Sweet.

  • Rambles, http://www.rambles.net/ (March 8, 2003), Nicky Rossiter, review of Inventing the Victorians.

  • Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema.com/ (Juily 17, 2006), Daniel Gritten, review of Shepperton Babylon.

  • Spectrum Culture, http://www.spectrumculture.com/ (February 25, 2018), John Paul, review of Operation Chaos.

  • William Morris Endeavor Clients website, http://www.wmeclients.com/ (July 17, 2018), biography of Matthew Sweet.

  • The Woman in White Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1999
  • Inventing the Victorians St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001
  • Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema Faber and Faber (London, England), 2005
  • The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels Faber and Faber (London, England), 2011
  • Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves Henry Holt and Company (New York, NY), 2017
1. The West end front : the wartime secrets of London's grand hotels https://lccn.loc.gov/2011535727 Sweet, Matthew. The West end front : the wartime secrets of London's grand hotels / Matthew Sweet London : Faber and Faber, 2011. ix, 362 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 24 cm. TX910.G7 S98 2011 ISBN: 97805712347760571234771 2. Shepperton Babylon : the lost worlds of British cinema https://lccn.loc.gov/2005434844 Sweet, Matthew. Shepperton Babylon : the lost worlds of British cinema / Matthew Sweet. London : Faber and Faber, 2005. 388 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. PN1993.5.G7 S94 2005 ISBN: 0571212972 3. Operation Chaos : the Vietnam deserters who fought the CIA, the brainwashers, and themselves https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032052 Sweet, Matthew, author. Operation Chaos : the Vietnam deserters who fought the CIA, the brainwashers, and themselves / Matthew Sweet. First edition. New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2018.©2017 pages cm JK468.I6 S983 2018 ISBN: 9781627794633 (hardcover) 4. Inventing the Victorians https://lccn.loc.gov/2002512155 Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians / Matthew Sweet. 1st U.S. ed. New York : St. Martin's Press, 2001. xxiii, 264 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. DA550 .S93 2001b ISBN: 0312283261 5. Inventing the Victorians https://lccn.loc.gov/2002523053 Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians / Matthew Sweet. London : Faber, 2001. xxiii, 264 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. DA550 .S93 2001 ISBN: 0571206581 6. The woman in white https://lccn.loc.gov/00269836 Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889. The woman in white / Wilkie Collins ; edited with an introduction and notes by Matthew Sweet. London ; New York : Penguin Books, 1999. xxxviii, 671 p. ; 20 cm. PR4494 .W5 1999 ISBN: 0140437312 7. The woman in white https://lccn.loc.gov/2003267781 Collins, Wilkie, 1824-1889. The woman in white / Wilkie Collins ; edited with an introduction and notes by Matthew Sweet. London ; New York : Penguin Books, [2003] xxxviii, 671 p. ; 20 cm. PR4494 .W5 2003 ISBN: 0141439610
  • IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2286972/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

    Matthew Sweet
    Biography
    Showing all 8 items
    Jump to: Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (3) | Personal Quotes (4)
    Mini Bio (1)

    Matthew Sweet is a writer and actor, known for Truly, Madly, Cheaply!: British B Movies (2008), Shepperton Babylon (2005) and Heart's Ease (2017).
    Trivia (3)
    He has worked as a columnist for The Big Issue, a film critic for The Independent on Sunday and he has contributed to BBC Radio 4.
    He attended Oxford University.
    He is a renowned expert on the television series Doctor Who (1963) and presented the 50th anniversary television special The Culture Show: Me, You and Doctor Who (2013).
    Personal Quotes (4)
    [on the mix of darkness and humour in Doctor Who (1963)] I think it's my favourite kind of storytelling as far as Doctor Who (1963) is concerned. It's certainly what makes Doctor Who (1963) richer and more watchable than some of its historical rivals. Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons: Episode One (1971) has killer gonks and a brilliantly nasty visual gag about a dead body inside a lunchbox. UFO (1970) has people in collarless shirts and suits standing glumly in white rooms. I know which I'd rather watch with my kids.
    [on Doctor Who (2005)] It also seemed to offer an amazingly inclusive view of sexuality in a place and a time when it's not often offered to this particular audience.
    [on The Professionals: Old Dog with New Tricks (1978)] What we get here is pretty extraordinary. It's an exploitation filmmaker's dream: violence, sex and an explosion all somehow brought together in the same dramatic moment. Full marks to them for ticking all of those boxes. Actually what I think emerges most from TV of this period is the utterly casual sexism that is never the issue but is always the background buzz of the culture.
    The idea of a black or woman Doctor is something we only seem to be able to enjoy as a tease. When Tom Baker left, for example, there was speculation about Joanna Lumley taking over. There is a little part of me that's disappointed the Obama [Barack Obama] effect hasn't reached Gallifrey yet.

    ilmography
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    Hide Hide Writer (10 credits)
    2012 Nice or Nasty?: The Making of Vengeance on Varos (Video documentary) (written by)
    2011 People Power and Puppetry (Video documentary short)
    2011 Riverside Story (Video documentary short)
    2009 The Rules of Film Noir (TV Movie documentary) (written by)
    2009 Cybermen (Video short) (written by)
    2008 Truly, Madly, Cheaply!: British B Movies (TV Movie documentary) (written by)
    2007 British Film Forever (TV Mini-Series documentary) (written by - 7 episodes)
    - Sauce, Satire and Silliness: The Story of British Comedy (2007) ... (written by)
    - Bullets, Bombs and Bridges: The Story of the War Film (2007) ... (written by)
    - Magic, Murder and Monsters: The Story of British Horror and Fantasy (2007) ... (written by)
    - Corsets, Cleavage and Country Houses: The Story of British Costume Drama (2007) ... (written by)
    - Hardship, Humour and Heroes: The Story of British Realism (2007) ... (written by)
    Show all 7 episodes
    2006 Silent Britain (TV Movie documentary) (written by)
    2005 Checking Into History (TV Series documentary) (written by - 6 episodes)
    - The Savoy (2005) ... (written by)
    - The Ritz (2005) ... (written by)
    - The Midland (2005) ... (written by)
    - The Grand (2005) ... (written by)
    - Claridge's (2005) ... (written by)
    Show all 6 episodes
    2005 Shepperton Babylon (TV Movie documentary)
    Hide Hide Actor (2 credits)
    2017 Heart's Ease (Short) (post-production)
    Radio Broadcaster #2
    2013 An Adventure in Space and Time (TV Movie)
    Menoptra (uncredited)
    Hide Hide Self (53 credits)
    2011-2017 Timeshift (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Author and Film Historian / Himself - Author and Broadcaster / Himself - Writer and Broadcaster / ...
    - Dial "B" for Britain: The Story of the Landline (2017) ... Himself - Author and Broadcaster
    - How to Be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective (2014) ... Himself - Writer and Broadcaster
    - Epic: A Cast of Thousands! (2011) ... Himself - Author and Film Historian
    - Dear Censor... The secret archive of the British Board of Film Classification (2011) ... Himself - Author and Film Historian
    - All the Fun of the Fair (2011) ... Himself - Historian
    2016 Virginia McKenna's Born Free (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Film Historian
    2016 Richard E. Grant on Ealing Comedies (TV Mini-Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Killer Jokes (2016) ... Himself
    - Kind Hearts and Accolades (2016) ... Himself
    - Passport to Success (2016) ... Himself
    2016 Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn (Documentary)
    Himself - Interviewee
    2016 Beatrix Potter with Patricia Routledge (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Historian
    2014-2015 It Was Alright in the... (TV Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Danger in the 70s (2015) ... Himself
    - Fear in the 80s (2015) ... Himself
    - The Brave New World of the 60s (2015) ... Himself
    - A 1970s Education (2015) ... Himself
    - Episode #1.2 (2014) ... Himself
    Show all 6 episodes
    2015 Premium Bond with Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Host
    2014 Al Murray's Great British Spy Movies (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Guest
    2014 The Real Tom Thumb: History's Smallest Superstar (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Author, Inventing the Victorians
    2014 Al Murray's Great British War Movies (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Guest
    2014 Britain's Favourite Detectives (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Journalist
    2011-2014 The Many Faces of... (TV Series documentary)
    Himself / Himself - Writer and Broadcaster
    - Dick Emery (2014) ... Himself
    - Dame Helen Mirren (2013) ... Himself
    - Michael Crawford (2013) ... Himself
    - Sid James (2013) ... Himself - Writer and Broadcaster
    - Ronnie Barker (2012) ... Himself - Writer and Broadcaster
    Show all 7 episodes
    2014 Greatest Mysteries (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Historian
    - Buckingham Palace (2014) ... Himself - Historian (as Dr. Matthew Sweet)
    2013 Greatest Stand Up Comedians (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2005-2013 The Culture Show (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Presenter / Himself
    - Me, You and Doctor Who (2013) ... Himself - Presenter
    - Michael Palin Special (2006) ... Himself - Presenter
    - Episode #2.9 (2005) ... Himself
    2013 A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (TV Mini-Series documentary)
    Himself - Wilkie Collins Expert
    - Detection Most Ingenious (2013) ... Himself - Wilkie Collins Expert
    2013 Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History (TV Mini-Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Happy Families: Hanoverians to Windsors (2013) ... Himself (as Dr Matthew Sweet)
    2013 Perspectives (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Film Expert
    - Jonathan Ross: Alfred Hitchcock - Made in Britain (2013) ... Himself - Film Expert
    2013 The Genius of Invention (TV Mini-Series)
    Himself - Film Historian
    - Visual Image (2013) ... Himself - Film Historian
    2013 Queen Victoria's Children (TV Mini-Series)
    Himself - Author, 'Inventing the Victorians'
    - Princes Will Be Princes (2013) ... Himself - Author, 'Inventing the Victorians' (as Dr Matthew Sweet)
    - A Domestic Tyrant (2013) ... Himself - Author, 'Inventing the Victorians' (as Dr Matthew Sweet)
    - The Best Laid Plans... (2013) ... Himself - Author, 'Inventing the Victorians' (as Dr Matthew Sweet)
    2013 Fifties British War Films: Days of Glory (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2007-2012 The Review Show (TV Series)
    Himself - Panelist
    - Episode dated 7 December 2012 (2012) ... Himself - Panelist
    - Episode dated 30 March 2012 (2012) ... Himself - Panelist
    - Episode dated 21 October 2011 (2011) ... Himself - Panelist
    - Episode dated 15 October 2010 (2010) ... Himself - Panelist
    - Episode dated 23 April 2010 (2010) ... Himself - Panelist
    Show all 13 episodes
    2012 Nice or Nasty?: The Making of Vengeance on Varos (Video documentary)
    Himself - Presenter
    2012 The Real Sherlock Holmes (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2011 All's Wells That Ends Wells (Video documentary short)
    Himself
    2011 One Hit Wonder (Video documentary short)
    Himself
    2011 People Power and Puppetry (Video documentary short)
    Himself - Presenter
    2011 Riverside Story (Video documentary short)
    Himself
    2011 The Story of the Music Hall with Michael Grade (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2011 Rex Appeal (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2011 When TV Goes to War (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2011 The Story of British Pathé (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Author and Film Critic
    - Entertaining Britain (2011) ... Himself - Author and Film Critic
    2011 Welly Telly: The Countryside on Television (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2011 Faulks on Fiction (TV Series documentary)
    Himself
    - The Snob (2011) ... Himself
    - The Hero (2011) ... Himself
    2010 Maid in Britain (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2010 Chain Reaction (Video documentary short)
    Himself - Presenter
    2010 Limehouse: A Victorian Chinatown (Video documentary short)
    Himself - Presenter (as Dr Matthew Sweet)
    2010 Sidekick Stories (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2009 Watching the Dead (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Critic
    2009 The Rules of Film Noir (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Presenter
    2009 Revealed (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Writer and Historian
    - Jack the Ripper: Tabloid Killer (2009) ... Himself - Writer and Historian
    2009 Cybermen (Video short)
    Himself
    2009 Top of the Cops (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2008 The Perfect TV Detective (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2008 Call the Cops (TV Mini-Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Episode #1.1 (2008) ... Himself
    2008 Truly, Madly, Cheaply!: British B Movies (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Presenter
    2008 The Cult of... (TV Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Howards' Way (2008) ... Himself
    - The Brothers (2008) ... Himself
    2007 Elementary My Dear Viewer (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2007 The Cinema Show (TV Series)
    Himself
    - Trust Me I'm a Doctor: Medics in the Movies (2007) ... Himself (as Dr. Matthew Sweet)
    2007 British Film Forever (TV Mini-Series documentary)
    Himself
    - Sauce, Satire and Silliness: The Story of British Comedy (2007) ... Himself
    - Corsets, Cleavage and Country Houses: The Story of British Costume Drama (2007) ... Himself
    - Hardship, Humour and Heroes: The Story of British Realism (2007) ... Himself
    - Longing, Loving and Leg-Overs: The Story of British Romance (2007) ... Himself
    - Guns, Gangsters and Getaways: The Story of the British Crime Thriller (2007) ... Himself
    2006 50 Films to See Before You Die (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself
    2006 Silent Britain (TV Movie documentary)
    Himself - Presenter
    2005 Checking Into History (TV Series documentary)
    Himself - Presenter
    - The Savoy (2005) ... Himself - Presenter
    - The Ritz (2005) ... Himself - Presenter
    - The Midland (2005) ... Himself - Presenter
    - The Grand (2005) ... Himself - Presenter
    - Claridge's (2005) ... Himself - Presenter
    Show all 6 episodes
    Edit
    Personal Details
    Other Works: He wrote and narrated the obituary to composer Dudley Simpson for BBC Radio 4's Last Word.
    Publicity Listings: 1 Interview | See more »
    Alternate Names: Dr Matthew Sweet | Dr. Matthew Sweet

  • WME Clients - http://wmeclients.com/literary/Non-Fiction/MATTHEW-SWEET

    Matthew Sweet is the author ofInventing the Victorians (2001),Shepperton Babylon (2005) and The West End Front (2011). A familiar voice in British broadcasting, he presents Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3, The Philosopher’s Arms and The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4. He has authored and presented dozens of radio and television documentaries on a wide variety of subjects: Wilhelm Reich, silent cinema, the rise of Nokia, eighteenth-century erotic writing, Parkinson’s Law, Alex Comfort, grand hotels, Doctor Who. His journalism appears regularly in Intelligent Life, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraphand Art Quarterly. He has judged the Costa Book Award, edited the Penguin Classics edition of The Woman in White and holds a D. Phil from Oxford University. His book The West End Front is currently in development as a BBC drama and he is Series Consultant on the Showtime/Sky Atlantic series Penny Dreadful.

    For all literary enquiries please contact Simon Trewin: SCT@wmeentertainment.com

    Latest Publication

    THE WEST END FRONT: THE WARTIME SECRETS OF LONDON'S GRAND HOTELS (Faber, 2011)

    The Ritz, the Savoy, the Dorchester and Claridge's- during the Second World War they teemed with spies, con-artists, deposed royals and the exiled governments of Europe. Meet the girl from MI5 who had the gravy browning licked from her legs by Dylan Thomas; the barman who was appointed the keeper of Churchill's private bottle of whiskey; the Ease End Communist who marched with his comrades into the air-raid shelter of the Savoy; the throneless prince born in a suite at Claridge's declared Yugoslav territory for one night only. Matthew Street has interviewed them all for this account of the extraordinary events that unfolded under the reinforced ceilings of London's grand hotels. Using the memories of first-hand witnesses, the contents of newly declassified government files and a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs and photographs, he has reconstructed a lost world of scandal, intrigue and fortitude.

    Radio Four's Book of the Week in November 2011.

    'Matthew Sweet's engrossing history of London's grand hotels during the Second World War is eye-opening...The West End Front is meticulously researched but, like a waiter at the Ritz, Sweet effortlessly serves up dish after dish of deliciously intriguing, scandalous and funny tales that give a rather different view of London life during the war.' -- Financial Times

    'A dazzling social history, full of cherishable eccentrics...' -- The Independent on Sunday

    'A scandalously enjoyable account of lives, losses and inconsiderate love-making, THE WEST END FRONT boasts a visitors' book like no other. From the egregious con man Sir Curtis Lampson to the louche inhabitants of the 'Pink Sink' bar, Fifth columnists, communists, spies, spivs, charlatans and deposed monarchs, they're all here, somehow keeping their crumpets butteres and their dignity intact during the worst excesses of the Ritzkrieg. Delightfully gossipy and often moving, it shines an affectionate search-light on an entirely forgotten chapter of World War Two.' -- Mark Gatiss

    Bibliography

    The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels (2011)

    The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels

    The West End Front (2011)
    Shepperton Babylon: The Lost World of British Cinema (2005)
    Inventing the Victorians (2001)

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Print Marked Items
Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p50+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
Matthew Sweet. Holt, $28 (384p) ISBN 978-1-62779-463-3
British journalist and BBC personality Sweet (The West End Front) details the strange and chaotic story of the "thousand-strong community of deserters and draft resisters" who went into exile in neutral Sweden during the Vietnam War, along with Operation Chaos, the CIA operation set up to spy on them. Sweet evocatively sketches his quest to uncover these resisters' lives. Some of the exiles seemed to be upright and idealistic, some were criminals, others were prone to bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories, and more than a few lived life through "a psychedelic filter." Sweet tries to unravel their stories, but admits that of the dozens of former exiles he interviewed, only some "are telling the truth." He injects himself into the narrative from the beginning, diligently recording how he tracked down and interviewed many of his subjects. In the book's second half, Sweet turns his attentions to the "apocalyptic" cult joined by several of the deserters. It was (and continues to be) led by the conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche, whom Sweet calls "the longest-running gag in U.S. fringe politics." Though rather fascinating, the highly detailed LaRouche narrative may exhaust some readers. Still, Sweet uncloaks a relatively little-known aspect of the Vietnam War-era counterculture. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 50+. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575693/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=471b4353. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575693
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Sweet, Matthew: OPERATION CHAOS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sweet, Matthew OPERATION CHAOS Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 2, 13 ISBN: 978-1-62779-463-3
Among the lesser-known effects of the Vietnam War was the desertion of a large number of American servicemen, many of whom made their way to Sweden.
Newsweek International contributing editor Sweet (West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels, 2011, etc.) begins with the defections of several men in 1968. In Japan, Mark Shapiro left his hotel and went to a safe house run by a Japanese antiwar group that put him on a Russian ship, eventually ending up in Stockholm. Shapiro quickly became a leader in the deserter community. Like the others Sweet interviewed nearly 50 years afterward, Shapiro is cagy about what he wants to tell about those days. The broad story is fairly clear, though. The deserters included antiwar idealists along with a fair number who saw desertion as their best way to get out of an increasingly impossible situation in Vietnam. The author does his best to record the different factions involved, as well as the attitude of the Swedes. At first, they welcomed the Americans as principled opponents of a colonial war, but they gradually became disillusioned. There were also a number of outside forces seeking to capitalize on the deserters: the Soviet Union, the international antiwar movement, the U.S. government, and others who saw them as tokens in a larger game. Sweet puts the spotlight on Lyndon LaRouche, whose conspiracy theories took hold among the deserters, following several of them who became members of his cultlike following. The author presents a wealth of intriguing stories about a largely unknown segment of the 1960s counterculture. Unfortunately, the presentation is somewhat disjointed, as Sweet jumps among a variety of perspectives. Readers looking for a neat conclusion to the deserters' story will likely be disappointed; the tale is ongoing, and the participants have gone in different directions. The shift from the antiwar story to the rise of the LaRouche cult, while implicit in the material, reads like an unannounced detour.
Full of fascinating material but fails to gel as a whole.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sweet, Matthew: OPERATION CHAOS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461318
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9962f8e9. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461318
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Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the
CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves. By Matthew Sweet.
Feb. 2018.384p. illus. Holt, $28 (9781627794633). 959.704.
Operation Chaos, a CIA operation that ran from 1967 to 1974, was intended to determine the extent of foreign influence on domestic protest groups, especially those involved in the antiwar and civil rights movements. This fascinating book tells the story of one of Operation Chaos' targets, the American Deserters Committee in Stockholm, where many American soldiers fighting in Vietnam fled after they deserted. The goal of Operation Chaos was to determine whether members of the Deserters Committee had been turned into sleeper agents, or even Manchurian Candidate-sxy\e assassins. The author believed the story was of purely historical interest, but, as he spoke to former soldiers who had deserted and moved to Sweden, he discovered that for some of these men past events are still impacting their lives in the present. He found former soldiers who are living in constant fear and under false identities, convinced that they remain at risk from the CIA. A surprising, tragic, and, in many places, angry story of a country's paranoia inflicting itself upon its own citizens.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 35. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=672c372f. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185562
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Step right up
Alexandra Mullen
New Criterion.
20.9 (May 2002): p76+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2002 Foundation for Cultural Review
Full Text:
Matthew Sweet Inventing the Victorians. St. Martin's Press, 264 pages, $23.95.
Matthew Sweet begins Inventing the Victorians with a sentence that should send a chill down your spine: "Suppose that everything we know about the Victorians is wrong." Horrors! Have we all been wasting our time for the last hundred years? Will more paper than Jarndyce v. Jarndyce produced be heading for the recycling bin? Here's Sweet's late-breaking newsflash: Victorians liked to have a good time, including in bed, and they didn't really put bloomers on their piano legs. The popularity of these vile canards is all the fault of the Freudians and the Bloomsburies and their (and our) craven need to prove our "modernity" by positing the Myth of the Stodgy Victorian.
This is news? Debunking misconceptions like these has been the chief occupation of Victorianists since at least the 1950s. Steven Marcus's book The Other Victorians came out in 1966 and since then the impulse to prove the randiness of Victorians has produced its own library. Consider, for example, the Case of the Modest Piano Leg: scholars haven't fallen for that chestnut in years. I know clarifying essays from 1974 and 1977 as well as a quick sideswipe from Gertrude Himmelfarb in 1994, none of which Sweet cites although he traces the same trail and quotes the same sources they do. So what poor ignorant savages require Sweet as a missionary of enlightenment? If you run through his many footnotes, Sweet's sources of stupidity on Victorianess come from popular journalism (such as a piece on woodworking in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution), a press release for a TV documentary on sex, and a recent English IKEA catalogue.
Still, Sweet's admirable-sounding aim is to restore a "rich and difficult and complex" view of Victorian culture. Here's a partial list of Victorian contributions to modern life that Sweet thinks are underappreciated:
IVF treatment, for example. Or the fax machine. Or the football [soccer]
league, political spin-doctoring, extravagant publicity stunts, heated
curling tongs, vending machines, the electric iron, the petrol-driven car,
the suburban housing estate, feminism, the London Underground, DIY [do it
yourself], investigative journalism, commercially-produced hardcore
pornography, instantaneous transcontinental communications networks,
high-rise public housing, plastic, free universal education, product
placement, fish and chips, X-ray technology, microbiology, sex contact ads,
paper bags, Christmas crackers, junk e-mail (by telegram, but still just as
annoying), global capitalism, interior design and Sanatogen.
This list is so amusing that I feel like a spoilsport in puncturing Sweet's balloon. But here goes. Telegrams are not, in fact, what we mean by e-mail at all. "Instantaneous transcontinental communications networks" is just a fancy way of referring to telegraphs. By "fax machine" I think he's referring to the telegraphs capable of transmitting images that date from about the 1870s; the "vending machines" he cites seem to boil down to one milk dispenser at a London branch of Sainsbury's. Athens surely saw its own political spin-doctoring, Rome had its high-rise apartment buildings, and sex contact ads (still preserved at Pompeii) must have made their first appearance east of Eden. What this list does show in miniature is Sweet's smoke and mirrors. It is true (as far as I know) that Victorians invented Christmas crackers and paper bags; it is not true (in any way that anyone cares about) that they invented feminism and global capitalism. The only way Sweet's sensationalistic claims can work, after all, is to blur distinctions between the huge and the minuscule, the important and the trivial, so as to render them all equal.
Sweet's book might not be smart but it does have its pleasures, especially if you're interested in freak shows, murders, opium houses, and the like. I learned some new things (the chapters about the tightrope walker Blondin and advertising gimmicks are quite good) and laughed over some news stories, but scholars have been both more systematic and more synthetic in going over similar material. (I'd recommend anything by the admirable polymath Richard Altick, particularly in this context Victorian Studies in Scarlet which first appeared in 1970.) As a further plus, the book is also usually free of the jargon that is one of the extremely dubious pleasures of reading most academic essays on Victorian underwear. Still, life is short, books are numerous. Few readers, I think, will find any compelling reason to take up Inventing the Victorians.
St. Martin's identifies Sweet on the book jacket as "a journalist whose work appears frequently in The Independent and The Guardian"; interestingly unmentioned is his thesis on the sensation fiction of the 1860s (no surprises there). Clearly scholarship is not on anyone's ticket, and Sweet carefully displays his street cred by frequenting, a penis-piercing parlour in the name of Prince Albert research. And the trade-off for the absence of academese is the presence of drum-rolling lines like "It is time for the freakish history of the nineteenth century to be reclaimed."
Sweet's choice of subjects, his attitude toward them, and the peculiar pop tone of this book give us a way of measuring both the trickle-down effect of psychoanalysis and contemporary literary theory and the trickle-up effect of '60s educational policies like "make it relevant" (accordingly Sweet begins his chapter on the Victorian reporting of sex scandals with his pointless encounter with Monica Lewinsky). For although Sweet doesn't talk like a post- structuralist, mocks psychoanalysis, and roasts Lytton Strachey, this book would be impossible without them.
Freud's great contributions to the twentieth-century included an attitude (smugly knowing better than you about yourself), an object of study (taking the previously marginal, such as a dream, a joke, or a slip of the tongue, as a central object of study), and, above all, the uncontradictable theory. Freud reveals himself in a 1911 footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900):
A little time ago I heard that a psychologist whose views are somewhat
different from ours had remarked to one of us that, when all was said and
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done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate the hidden sexual significance of
dreams: his own commonest dream was of going upstairs, and surely there
could not be anything sexual in that. We were put on the alert by this
objection, and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps,
staircases and ladders in dreams, and were soon in a position to show that
staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of
copulation.
No matter how much we protest that something--anything--is not about sex, a canny Freudian can always claim we're repressing it. Dissent has been paralyzed. In our day, Freud's moves have been rechoreographed for cultural studies, deconstruction, the New Historicism, and so forth, in which obscure events are presented as revealing crucial trends--all the more significant, of course, for having been hitherto intellectually "repressed" by a hegemonic academic elite. Sweet castigates Freud for thinking that Victorians were repressed, but, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, he has adopted Freud's attitude and techniques.
One of Freud's first English readers, Lytton Strachey, is Sweet's main intellectual villain. Sweet identifies Eminent Victorians, Strachey's "poison-pen letter to the past" as doing "more than any other text to fix the twentieth century's attitude to the nineteenth." The book solidified the view that Victorians were stodgy, their beds filled with "bugs and disasters" (Strachey's phrase) and provided the disinfectant--ridicule. Further, Strachey deliberately (Oedipally?) distorted the Victorians to create a vision of his generation as brave oppositional figures, rebels, Moderns. This has been the standard view of Eminent Victorians since its appearance at the end of the First World War. It's not news. What might be news to Sweet is how much his own tone, as well as parts of his scattershot method, echoes Strachey. Strachey trained as an historian--his dissertation was on Warren Hastings and the Begum of Oudh (not, although it sounds like it, one of Strachey's jokes)--and his outrageousness was carefully calibrated. Even as early as 1912, Strachey wrote Lady Ottoline Morrell that he planned to write "from a slightly cynical standpoint." The onset of the war only hardened his resolve, and his counter- weapons to that older generation of blunderers were doubles entendres and cheating.
In a way--a Cretan way--Strachey plays fair: he tells you all decisions will be arbitrary and final. So we shouldn't be surprised that although he claimed to be dipping his "little bucket" randomly into the Great Victorian Ocean, he cheated once again and in fact showed us four figures chosen as representative of the Victorian authority he loathed: an ecclesiastic (Cardinal Manning), an educational authority (Thomas Arnold), a woman of action (Florence Nightingale), and a man of action (General Gordon). Sweet's bucket is bigger than Strachey's, but the lucky dip is still rigged. Sweet's representatives of Victorian England are "the bisexual pornography in which the two heroes indulge in guiltless sex with each other before climbing into bed with the two heroines; the children's adventure serial starring a cross-dressing teenage boy; the advertisements that wooed people like you and me into meetings with personalities like Julia Pastrana the Baboon Lady, Miss Atkinson the Pig Woman and the Bipenis Boy." I don't know about you, but I'm not ponying up for Julia Pastrana.
It is at moments like these (and there are many) that Sweet's debt to the Modernity he castigates is clear. For he is not making a plausible argument that he is recreating a curious side of Victorian life. He is arguing both that such figures and activities constituted part of the Victorian mainstream and that they are positive goods. And he's also arguing that we should lap them up because they're really just like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Jerry Springer Show, and similar entertainments we happily feed on. Sweet pretends to find our age inferior to the nineteenth century, but precisely what he finds praiseworthy about Victorians is how they're "just like us": tattooed drug-taking mall-crawlers. If he's right, there's new force to Walt Kelly's words "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."
Fortunately, Sweet is wrong. Despite the bucketloads of circumstantial social detail crammed into his book, it's a profoundly ahistorical and inhuman work. The pleasures he so lovingly enumerates--the children's toys, opium dens, freak shows, and penis rings--are all physical ones. He displays no interest in mentioning, let alone understanding, the no less intense intellectual or spiritual pleasures of the age, or domestic life outside of interior decoration. He has indeed invented his own Victorians, but they are automata without soul or mind. I think, in fact, Sweet should reconsider his relationship with Strachey, for he's already writing according to Strachey's motto in Eminent Victorians: "Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian." Sweet's book demonstrates that the spirit of the marginal has left the enclosed groves of academe and is walking the world at large. And that really is chilling news.
Alexandra Mullen teaches Victorian literature at Providence College. Mullen, Alexandra
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mullen, Alexandra. "Step right up." New Criterion, May 2002, p. 76+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A86743315
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=78fb4fe8. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A86743315
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Dumb, dumber, dumbest
KATHRYN HUGHES
New Statesman.
130.4562 (Nov. 5, 2001): p51. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
INVENTING THE VICTORIANS Matthew Sweet
Faber and Faber, 304pp, [pound]16.99 Discount at www.newstatesman.ca.uk
In this puzzling book, Matthew Sweet sets out to show that the Victorians were not the prissy, plodding stick-in-the-muds we like to believe. Rather, he argues, they were friskily go-ahead, sleeping with whomever they felt like, zapping electronic communications around the world, and putting a spin on every difficult story that came out of Westminster. Yes, that's right, they were just like us.
But who is "us"? The central problem of Sweet's book is his hopeless muddle about whom he is addressing. There can be very few intelligent and educated people -- and this is a Faber book, after all -- who still think that the Victorians were proto-Thatcherites wedded to a single set of repressive "values" that they insisted on inflicting on all and sundry. Over the past 20 years, the work of academics such as Raphael Samuel, John Tosh, Peter Gay and a whole army of others has been dedicated to introducing light, shade, complication and subtlety to the way we think about 65 years of British social history. The odd thing is that Sweet, who is a journalist, knows about this work -- indeed, he relies on it heavily -- yet still manages to suggest, by using the boldly possessive "I think", that he has come up with some kind of radical revisionism all on his own.
Much of the material on which Sweet rests his argument has been used before, not just by professional historians, but by the exploding number of television producers currently scrabbling around for suitable subjects to turn into one-hour historical documentaries for Channel 4 and BBC2. Thus the chapter on the tabloid press, designed to demonstrate that it was not us but the Victorians who came up with the idea of the popular sex scandal, rests almost entirely on one particular case history, the wearisome "Maiden Tribute of Babylon" episode. This tangled tale of compromised investigative journalism (in 1885, the campaigning editor W T Stead tried to buy an under-age girl for sex in order to demonstrate the flourishing state of the white slave trade to readers of the Pall Mall Gazette) has been told before, and told better by Judith Walkowitz in City of Dreadful Delight (1992). Although Sweet acknowledges his debt to Walkowitz in a footnote, he bafflingly waits until a completely different chapter -- on serial killers -- before introducing her name into the main body of his text.
Sweet's methodology, which is to grab examples of apparently un-Victorian Victorians without worrying too much about detail or context, leads him to make some pretty strange (and sometimes completely wrong) assertions. He pays a huge amount of attention to sex, which is probably to be expected, but manages to muddle the crucial details. As evidence that not all Victorians were locked into dreary marital monogamy, he cites John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, claiming that they cohabited for a decade until the death of Taylor's husband allowed them to get married. In reality, the couple never lived together, and may never have consummated what was undoubtedly a very powerful, if anguished, love. Likewise, Sweet suggests that the way Mary Ann Evans (whom he never clarifies as being the novelist George Eliot, presumably because he assumes his readers will be sufficiently clued-up about the 19th century to know this already) and George Henry Lewes cohabited for 25 years is evidence that the Victorians were goers . In fact, Evans's decision to live with Lewes caused both of them excruciating unhappiness, and resulted in her exclusion from the normal social life of literary London for at least a decade. If anything, Evans's experience is evidence of just how harshly even the most progressive-seeming mid-Victorians reacted to female sexual transgression.
If Sweet is casual about the variegated nature of Victorian experience, he is even more cavalier about the life and times of moderns. When he comes across those who are attached to versions of the 19th century that do not accord with his own, he dismisses them, with a sneer, as old, stupid, provincial and Conservative (quite definitely with a large "C"). In one particularly uncomfortable passage, he pokes fun at the annual Victorian festival in Llandrindod Wells, Powys, which he sees as a kind of delusional homage to a fantasy of a safe and pretty past. To a certain extent, he has a point: some of what goes on in Liandrindod every August is nonsense. But for those who look carefully and bother to listen properly, there is a wealth of specialist knowledge among the visiting speakers and the long-time inhabitants, not about some monolithic "Victorian" experience, but about the very particular phenomenon of late 19th-century spa-town culture in English-speaking Wales.
It is this inability to break up "Victorian" into a multitude of contradictory and overlapping strands (despite all his talk about Foucault and discourse analysis, Sweet never quite gets it) that does everyone a disservice.
The Victorians emerge as a bunch of circus-freakish, opium-addicted shagging machines, while "we" -- that is, everyone contemporary with Sweet who doesn't agree with him -- are credulous fools who think that sending children up chimneys was probably a reasonable price to pay for all that lovely law and order. Also made to look stupid are a bunch of people known simply as "academics", obsessive feminist social historians who bang on about clitoridectomies with very little evidence that the Victorians in reality carried them out. Quite honestly, it is all a bit more complicated than that.
Kathryn Hughes's George Eliot: the last Victorian (Fourth Estate, [pound]8.99) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She is working on a biography of Mrs Beeton
HUGHES, KATHRYN
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
HUGHES, KATHRYN. "Dumb, dumber, dumbest." New Statesman, 5 Nov. 2001, p. 51. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A80023140/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=18ed2541. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A80023140
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Love letter
Christopher Bray
New Statesman.
134.4728 (Feb. 21, 2005): p52+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Shepperton Babylon: the lost worlds of British cinema Matthew Sweet
Faber & Faber, 388pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
What's your favourite British film? No, I'm not talking about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Love Actually--pictures as British as Gruyere. I'm talking about The Colditz Story and The Captive Heart, about Seance on a Wet Afternoon and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Films starring John Mills and Jack Hawkins, Anthony Steel and Sylvia Syms, Richard Wattis and Googie Withers. Films that before anything else--including the chance of making money on foreign shores--are about Britain and Britishness. Small films, generally. Cosy films most of the time. Monochrome films almost without exception.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Attitudes towards them tend to be similarly black and white. The average critic has never had much time for British pictures, and serious critics no time at all. In the 1950s, Roger Manvell, the pioneer director of the British Film Academy, said that home-grown films put him in mind of "faded leaves painted in exquisite detail by a lady in Cornwall". A decade later, in the highly influential magazine Movie, Victor Perkins asserted that "British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive." Francois Truffaut was even less kind. There is, he once suggested, "a certain incompatibility between the words 'cinema' and 'Britain'". There is a fitting ambiguity to that "certain": righteous abrasiveness hiding beneath diffident politesse. What is this British cinema Truffaut deplores, after all, if not a cinema that obsesses over surface niceties while fighting shy of emotional revelation?
Certainly, a glance at the cover of Shepperton Babylon suggests that Truffaut and co had a point. Matthew Sweet's fascinating labour of love is adorned with a three-quarter-length study of a stetsoned and leather-trousered Dirk Bogarde. The image--in which Bogarde's left arm is wrapped around his waist, his right elbow resting on it the better for his hand to fondle his cheek--comes from Roy Ward Baker's The Singer Not the Song, a homoerotic western that contrives to be even more confused about itself than its damply camp leading man. Bogarde, who had bought the leather trousers while on holiday in Rome and insisted on wearing them throughout the film, doubtless fancied they helped give him the rough-trade look that Marlon Brando had recently made his own. Yet the set of his hat is too jaunty, the cock of his wrist too come-hither, the leather about his loins too lustrous for the effect to be anything other than laughable.
But if Bogarde was no Brando, Matthew Sweet is no Kenneth Anger. Though his title is plainly modelled on Anger's Hollywood Babylon, his book could not be more different. Not for Sweet Anger's tabloid tittle-tattle. Although the odd unwanted pregnancy and abortion-induced death sneaks into its pages, Shepperton Babylon is essentially a passionate love letter to our national cinema. Until reading it, I though it was only me who watched those "they flew to Bruges"-type films that go out on Channel 4 of an afternoon. Sweet not only watches them, he records them to watch again. How many other viewers of Bhowani Junction have noticed that, by the time he came to star in the film, Stewart Granger's "sideburns had turned a snowy white, like the first trickle of an avalanche hitting the lower slopes"? Not that Sweet is just a buff. His judgements are spot on. George Formby, with his "receding chin ... huge mouth full of monstrous clothes-peg teeth ... jug ears ... tiny eyes and ... slick of Brylcreemed hair", really did look "like a human being reflected in a tap". The Boulting brothers' comedies were "sour and plaguey". John Mills never could act.
Despite its panoptic feel, however, the book has some curious omissions. Margaret Rutherford--one of our cinema's most singular creations--gets only one mention; Will Hay gets none. And where are Alistair Sim, Ian Carmichael and Terry-Thomas? Where are the Hammer Horrors, James Bond and the Carry Ons? True, these mini-genres have been widely written about, but nobody has ever come up with a persuasive explanation for their enduring popularity. Still, Sweet gives us plenty to be getting on with. His mammoth researches--including conversations with writers, directors, producers, actors and cameramen from the earliest days of British cinema to the 1970s--will furnish ideas and material for a hundred PhDs.
Whether he has really put up a defence of the British cinema is another thing. Much as I enjoyed Shepperton Babylon, the book never dissuaded me from the Truffaut line. The best British films just do not compare with their counterparts from other countries. I love School for Scoundrels, but cannot pretend that it is as vital a work as Scarlet Street. For all its emphasis on the realities of war, The Big Blockade tells me less about life than the fantasy world of The Big Sleep. Our cinema's broken-backed nature might be down to politics (the class system), sexuality (the repression underlying the stiff upper lip) or aesthetics (the dominance of our literary tradition). Whatever, but for all their succulent ham, British movies have never quite cut the mustard.
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Christopher Bray's critical biography of Michael Caine will appear from Faber & Faber this autumn Bray, Christopher
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bray, Christopher. "Love letter." New Statesman, 21 Feb. 2005, p. 52+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A130056227
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=43734653. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A130056227
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Inventing The Victorians. (Fresh air in the hothouse)
Jane Ridley
Spectator.
287.9041 (Nov. 17, 2001): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
INVENTING THE VICTORIANS by Matthew Sweet Faber, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 264, ISBN 0571206581
How prudish were the Victorians? Did they really cloak the legs of their pianos for decency's sake? Matthew Sweet argues in this lively book that the idea of the Victorians as tight-laced, repressed hypocrites is a myth. The Victorians, according to Sweet, were remarkably similar to us -- in some ways more liberated. Working as an investigative journalist, Sweet sifts through classified ads and pokes about in houses that were once the homes of murderers or the dens of opium addicts.
Victorian England, he claims, was a sex-and-shopping society of sensations, celebrities, PR and tabloid news. The grocer Thomas Lipton dreamed up ever-crazier stunts involving giant cheeses stuffed with gold sovereigns in order to gain free newspaper space, which he knew was the essence of successful PR. Celebrities such as Lillie Langtry mainlined on publicity: `The only fascinating thing about her was that lots of people thought she was really fascinating.'
W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was the father of modern British journalism, the first man to walk the tabloid tightrope between moral indignation and pornography. To publicise the scandal of the white slave traffic, when English girls were (allegedly) sold into slavery in Belgian brothels, Stead arranged for a 13-year-old girl to be kidnapped and smuggled abroad, and then wrote the `story' up. His `revelations' spurred Parliament to raise the age of consent to 16 in 1882, though when the scare was exposed he was sentenced to three months in Holloway, which earned him yet more publicity.
Matthew Sweet has sleuthed the film studio in Hove (now a kitchen showroom) where the first blue movie was shot in 1897. But the cinema brought censorship, not liberation. No one checked novels for obscenity in the way that the British Board of Film Censors (founded in 1912) scanned films. The Victorians were lax on drugs too. Opium was everywhere -- it was opium, not religion, that was the opium of the people. In the Fens the farming community lived in a permanent state of narcotic dilation. People worried about the unhealthy effects of green tea while doping themselves freely with laudanum and cocaine.
Dickens's story The Mystery of Edwin Drood implied an East End packed with opium dens, but in fact there was only one London street like this -- Shadwell Court. Victorians didn't need to smoke opium in a squalid den when it could be bought cheaply over the counter at the chemist's. The cute TV image of a London criminal underworld of swirling fogs and flickering gas lamps is a 20th-century invention. Victorian murders were uncannily similar to our own. Dr William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, murdered his own children and at least 16 patients, eerily prefiguring the career of Harold Shipman. The murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne echoes the murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, who was killed and horrifically butchered in a Hampshire village one hot August afternoon in 1867 -- hence the phrase, Sweet FA.
The Victorians were not prudes. Sweet discounts the writings of doctors such as William Ayrton, who pronounced in 1857, `The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.' Accepting this kind of stuff at face value is like reading The Surrendered Wife as evidence of 21st-century marriage. Sweet has little time for the feminists, and is especially allergic to Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsberries who (according to him) fixed our ideas about Victorian sexual prudery.
In fact, claims Sweet, the sex that suffered an identity crisis was (yes, you guessed it) male: it was men who found the whole Victorian patriarchy thing impossibly stressful. Homosexuality, however, was not really an issue. The Victorians didn't force sexuality into pathologies as we do, polarising men into homosexuals and heterosexuals. Male sexuality then was more fluid and less tribalist than our own.
This isn't an academic treatise, but Matthew Sweet has opened a blast of fresh air into the hothouse of Victorian studies. His book is packed with weird and wonderful information, but it's quirky and uneven. And the jury is still out on the piano-leg theory of Victorian sex. How much more subtle, interesting and erotic the Victorians seem if they really did follow all those complex mating rituals, moral codes, taboos and double standards -- how disappointing, if Sweet is to be believed, and they were just like us.
Ridley, Jane
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ridley, Jane. "Inventing The Victorians. (Fresh air in the hothouse)." Spectator, 17 Nov. 2001, p. 48. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A80682359/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=14bb8cf6. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A80682359
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Typically, touchingly British
Gilbert Adair
Spectator.
297.9212 (Feb. 26, 2005): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
SHEPPERTON BABYLON by Matthew Sweet Faber; 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 388, ISBN 0571212972 11.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848
If you recall, Britain elected to celebrate the cinema's centenary in 1996 instead of, as in most other countries, the previous year. The argument was that, though 1895 was indeed the year in which the first public screening of a motion picture was held (in France), it wasn't in fact until 1896 that the new medium had its premiere here. Which is rather like dating celebrations of the invention of the wheel from the year in which a British Neanderthal first rolled one down a hill.
But then, in matters cinematic, we have virtually always been out of step, derided when not simply ignored by the international critical establishment. (The most devastating snub was Truffaut's when he posited what he termed an 'incompatibility' between the very words 'Britain' and 'cinema'.) And it's this injustice, as he perceives it, that Matthew Sweet sets out to challenge in his wittily, and not altogether misleadingly, titled book, Shepperton Babylon.
Subtitled 'The Lost Worlds of British Cinema', it belongs to the subgenre of cultural sociology generally known as an 'oral history'. Sweet has taken it upon himself to track down and interview just about every living survivor of the 100-year-old British film industry, from long-forgotten actresses of the silent era to the spivvy practitioners of Sixties soft-core porn, after which our national cinema 'moulted', recharging its batteries with the dark energy of predominantly working-class themes. His is not a new idea, then, except that he is the very first to apply such a method to the British. rather than the American, cinema.
And what an extraordinary file of stories he has brought back from these lost worlds. Reading his hugely entertaining book, one is prompted to ask: has there ever been another film culture at the same time so drearily prosaic yet so incorrigibly eccentric, both shabby-genteel and shabby-surreal? There are anecdotes here that are not merely funny or poignant but downright haunting.
Isidore Ostrer, one of three brothers, Jewish refugees from the Ukraine, who founded Gainsborough Pictures, eked out a precarious early livelihood 'playing dominoes for cash on trains between the Essex coast and Liverpool Street'. The novelist and screenwriter Nigel Balchin was also the inventor of the Aero chocolate bar. Susan Shaw, a pallid wimpette of the Rank Charm School, was actually born Patsy Sloots. (Now there's a name that's both prosaic and eccentric!) When promoting her films in provincial cinemas, Jean Kent always brought along her own bouquet of flowers 'in case they didn't have one'. And, perhaps most haunting of all, at the age of 16 Dulcie Gray, sweet little Dulcie Gray, the darling of Shaftesbury Avenue coach parties, the quintessence of middlebrow gentility (her whispered nickname among film crews was 'Gracie Dull'), escaped from her abominated Malayan home and, while still in her teens, 'ran a girls' boarding school, ate opium, crushed monstrous black scorpions by the brace and wrote a popular song entitled "You Tickle Me Spitless, Baby"'. Dulcie Gray!
So how is it that, invested with so much native gumption and spunk, the most typical products of our domestic cinema have tended to be films that are an insult not only to the intelligence but to the imagination? If that's a question Sweet never gets around to posing, it's for the simple reason that he doesn't see the need. There is, to Shepperton Babylon, a polemical thrust that is its weakest feature, not because its author argues for (in my opinion) a ludicrously lofty reappraisal of mainstream British cinema but because he himself finds it difficult to support his case with plausible evidence.
Consider just one example: the director Pen Tennyson, whose premature death robbed Ealing, according to Sweet, 'of one of its most promising and politically committed talents'. Given the trio of films Tennyson did direct (notably, The Proud Valley, a Welsh mining drama with Paul Robeson, which is, to mimic the book's own jokey style, the absolute pits), that is an absurd statement, unless you believe that every artist who dies young is promising by definition. And, compounding the absurdity, Sweet himself, once he gets down to the critical nitty-gritty, can offer no more than lukewarm praise for the films in question.
The strength of his book lies elsewhere--in its affectionate evocation of a vanished world and the strange and sleazy and rather wonderful characters who peopled that world. Even Truffaut might have enjoyed it.
Adair, Gilbert
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Adair, Gilbert. "Typically, touchingly British." Spectator, 26 Feb. 2005, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A130213574
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=49d4e376. Accessed 6 June 2018.
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The Ritz in the Blitz
Mark Mason
Spectator.
317.9562 (Dec. 3, 2011): p45+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The West End Front
by Matthew Sweet
Faber, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 362, ISBN 9780571234776
'It was like a drug, a disease,' said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There's something magical about London's grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour to tell tales of the human dramas the hotels hosted during the second world war.
It's surely the variety of people gathered together in one place that explains the fascination held by the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge's et al. The good, the bad and the clinically barking all share the same address for a night, then tomorrow the castlist changes. In the old days you didn't even have to be rich to join in--as Sweet relates, guests sometimes scarpered without paying their bills, and hotels would offer a 'duchess rate' to toffs who'd kept their titles but lost their money.
As any sitcom writer will tell you, disparate characters plus close confinement equals golddust, and there's plenty of comedy in this book. A bandleader at the May Fair rejects requests written on any banknote smaller than a fiver. A guest at the Dorchester mistrusts the ceiling in the Gents during bombing raids, so collects empty wine glasses from the ballroom as an alternative. At the same hotel, whose 1941 New Year's Eve dinner had a novelty postage- stamp-sized menu, the young waiter Clement Freud banks on no one being able to read it, and 'forgets' to supply his table with the caviar course, eating all ten portions himself. Among the possessions of a female spy holed up at the Waldorf is a small wrap of blue paper containing a fine white powder. The authorities send it for analysis. It's a packet of salt from a bag of Smith's crisps.
There are serious tales too. A group of East End activists march on the Savoy and demand to be let in to the hotel's air raid shelter. Led by Phil Piratin, who could halve an apple with a twist of his hands, they succeed. Tucked up alongside the Duke and Duchess of Kent they get a good night's sleep under the watchful eye, or rather ear, of the hotel's 'snore warden'. Kitchen workers at the Savoy are rounded up and sent to internment camps simply because they're Italian: 'wartime Britain was not a democracy'.
If you wanted to be harsh on this book you could say that Sweet spends a little too much time outside the hotels themselves, filling in back stories, painting a picture of the wider society. But then again understanding the different characters who are lumped together requires those back stories, and to get a feel for the hotels' workers and guests you need to know what sort of country they lived in.
We actually see that country changing during the book. At the Savoy, where waiters were forbidden to wear watches, rings, spectacles or false teeth, a diner clicks his fingers to attract attention. 'I'm sorry, sir,' replies the waiter, 'have you lost your dog?'
One of the most famous elements of the second world war--imminent death leading to widespread and carefree sex--is underlined throughout the book. Everyone's at it like antique silver knives. Stella Lonsdale (she of the Smith's crisps) is, according to her MI5 handler, 'a woman whose loose living would make her an object of shame on any farmyard.' An air-vent behind the Dorchester is nicknamed 'the hotplate' because it warms the local prostitutes known as the Hyde Park Rangers. Douglas Fairbanks Junior, a regular at Claridge's, knows the fire escape well because of the affair he once conducted with Marlene Dietrich. Meanwhile the basement bar at the Ritz is the best gay pick-up joint in town: 'the Pink Sink'.
Adding to the pleasure of these tales is Sweet's knack as a phrase-monger. One businessman is 'enormous in Malayan rubber'. An army officer has 'a taste for raw onions, violence and nudity'. A noble lord is 'a disciple of the blood-drinking occultist Aleister Crowley and widely regarded as one of the worst poets in Britain'. Strange people, strange times. Check yourself in for a good read.
Mason, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mason, Mark. "The Ritz in the Blitz." Spectator, 3 Dec. 2011, p. 45+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A274305289
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1d9b1155. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A274305289
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Inventing the Victorians. (Nonfiction)
Matthew Sweet
Kirkus Reviews.
69.22 (Nov. 15, 2001): p1603. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
INVENTING THE VICTORIANS
St. Martin's (256 pp.)
$23.95
Dec. 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28326-1
A skewering of the popular view that Victorians were the uptight and stern figures we know and love to make fun of.
In fact, British academic Sweet argues, our modern culture is directly descended from their love of spectacle, sex and true crime stories. Most people today, according to Sweet, view the Victorian era as one of strict moral codes, cruelty to children, and repressed sexuality. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was more drug use, more sex, more innovation in journalism and public spectacles than the hypercorrect picture of the Victorians most people are familiar with would suggest. In terms of spectacle, the author makes a convincing argument that the Victorians had a higher threshold for danger and excitement. Tightrope walker Blondin grew to fame in a series of daring trips across Niagara Falls on a two-inch rope. This was not the choreographed violence of the World Wrestling Federation, but real mortal danger. Blondin spawned many copycats, and the popularity of this perilous sport waned only after several deaths. Sweet labors to make comparisons between Victorian and modem phenomena--serial ki llers then were often celebrated figures, on display at Madame Tussaud's wax works, but he says it's hard to imagine William Shipman or Jeffery Dahlmer getting such attention. But yet, perhaps it is 24-hour cable news coverage that has taken the place of the waxy tableaux in our time, and not a diminishment of bloodthirstiness. The desire to see Victorians as more upright, and therefore better than us, stems from the age-old human desire to look back on a comforting past, to be able to say, "things were better then." Now that the 20th century is over, Sweet argues, the nostalgia and puzzlement will be over its customs, wars, and fashions, allowing the Victorians to rest in a more accurate peace.
Sweet shines a light in some dark comers of the Victorian Era--but, ultimately, over-argues his point. (16 pages b&w photos) Sweet, Matthew
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sweet, Matthew. "Inventing the Victorians. (Nonfiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2001, p. 1603. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A80899692/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6e37ee2a. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A80899692
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Inventing the victorians. (Nonfiction)
Publishers Weekly.
248.46 (Nov. 12, 2001): p50. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
MATTHEW SWEET. St. Martin's, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 0-312-28326-1
Commonly perceived as stodgy, stern, pious, humorless and deeply repressed, Victorians are frequently invoked in contemporary society as embodiments of everything their more liberated descendants are not. But this perception, Sweet suggests, is far from accurate. Noting that our image of the Victorians is based on a very selective range of materials, Sweet, a British writer, argues that we have almost willfully developed a distorted idea of 19th-century society largely in order to flatter ourselves with the belief that our own age is far more enlightened. Working with a wide-ranging array of documents--letters, diaries, newspapers, novels and plays--Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians not only were in some ways more progressive, more sophisticated and less neurotic than we are, they also had a lot more fun than we give them credit for. To that end, he leads readers on a whirlwind tour through the more outre aspects of Victorian life and culture, demonstrating that the 19th century was in many respect s as much an era of thrill- seeking, sexual liberation and social upheaval as our own time. While he's arguably as selective in his own source materials and interpretations as are those whose perspective he seeks to debunk, Sweet does paint a more complex picture of the Victorians than we're used to seeing; this is a lively, entertaining trip through a side of 19th-century society most of us are probably unfamiliar with. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Inventing the victorians. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 12 Nov. 2001, p. 50. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A80372003/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=296e23a9. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A80372003
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Inventing the Victorians. (History)
Nigel Tappin
Library Journal.
126.20 (Dec. 2001): p147+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians. St. Martin's. Dec. 2001. c.256p. photogs. index. ISBN 0-312-28326-1. $23.95. HIST
This fun, iconoclastic read from a British journalist and recent Ph.D. shows that stereotypes of Victorian society don't bear scrutiny. Sweet uses Victorian books, periodicals, memoirs, and advice manuals to counter the myths of a strait-laced, repressed, patriarchal, and gloomy culture. Through an analysis of historical pop culture, Victorians are uncovered as progressive, sexually confused, high-tech, sensation-seeking media junkies. Sweet concludes that the Victorians invented "modernity" and reveals various oft-quoted "facts" to be false. Piano legs, for example, were not modestly hidden, nor legs called limbs; and Queen Victoria had no connection with drafting the amendment criminalizing male "indecent acts"--the sponsor merely hoped to reduce buggery's penalty. Sweet points out that mainstream pornography at that time depicted men having same-sex couplings as preludes to male-female sex and that one-third of women were in the formal workforce (favored in the then technologically advanced areas of telegraphy and typing). This book can be enjoyed by a wide audience and is essential reading for 19th-century history buffs and professionals. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.--Nigel Tappin, Huntsville, Ont.
Tappin, Nigel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tappin, Nigel. "Inventing the Victorians. (History)." Library Journal, Dec. 2001, p. 147+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A81222875/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d3bce5f6. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A81222875
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Inventing the Victorians
Contemporary Review.
280.1635 (Apr. 2002): p255. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2002 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
Full Text:
Inventing the Victorians. Matthew Sweet. Faber and Faber. [pounds sterling]16.99. 264 pages. ISBN 0-571-20658-1. The author, a film critic and something of a man of letters, set out in this book 'to re-imagine the Victorians', to separate myths about the Victorians from facts, to shatter the stereotypes still held about 'the Victorians'. While little of this will be new or startling to historians of the period, it may probably be new to the vast majority who are tempted to read this book. Therefore the author's enthusiasm, while somewhat embarrassing to the professional historian, is no bad thing. Our attitudes to Victorian civilisation tell us more about ourselves than about the nineteenth century. It is not unusual for one era to denigrate the preceding one. Indeed, it may be a necessary sign of vigour. Our denigration of the Victorians is harmful because it implies that ours is a new civilisation whereas in almost every area we had our beginnings before 1901 - itself an arbitrary and meaningless division.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Inventing the Victorians." Contemporary Review, Apr. 2002, p. 255. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A85532667
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=48ea4271. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A85532667
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Inventing the Victorians. (History)
Mary Carroll
Booklist.
98.7 (Dec. 1, 2001): p627. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians. Dec. 2001. 256p. illus. index. St. Martin's, $23.95 (0-312-28326-1). 941.081.
If Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) set the tone for twentieth-century rejection of Victorian attitudes and sensibilities, journalist Sweet aims to reverse that rejection in the twenty-first century. In arguing that "Victorian culture was as rich and difficult and complex and pleasurable as our own; that the Victorians shaped our lives and sensibilities in countless unacknowledged ways," Sweet explores multiple aspects of our ancestors' culture. Sensation seeking, the earliest motion pictures, advertising innovations, sex scandals, serial killers, and opium dens are among the unexpected Victorian pleasures that attract Sweet's interest. The author also takes a second look at the Victorian reputation for stodginess in food, etiquette, and home furnishings; defends freak shows; examines the Victorians' sanctification of the child; challenges simplistic views of Victorian patriarchy and pornography; and emphatically denies that Victorian and contemporary attitudes toward sex are polar opposites. Lively and provocative.
Carroll, Mary
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carroll, Mary. "Inventing the Victorians. (History)." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2001, p. 627. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A80852107/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=59872f33. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A80852107
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Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema
Aubry Anne D'Arminio
Moving Image.
6.1 (Spring 2006): p131+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu/journals/movingimage/default.html
Full Text:
Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema by Matthew Sweet Faber and Faber, 2005.
In the Q and A available at the Web site for the BBC Four documentary based on Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, Matthew Sweet explains how his idea for the book originated during an interview with the then-eighty-nine-year-old American expatriate Constance Cummings:
I wondered if there were other veterans
who could talk about the experiences they
had in the 1930s, perhaps even further
back. Many of the silent actors didn't
have careers into the sound period, and I
wondered if any of them could still be
alive. Could they be in a nursing home
somewhere, telling a teenage care assistant
that they used to be in pictures?
Would it be possible to track them down
and get them to tell me their stories?
Shepperton Babylon, Sweet affirms in the book's introduction, is the culmination of thousands of such conversations--"an attempt to pursue the story of our native cinema to the limits of living memory" (8). Yet the final product is not the oral history of the UK film industry that Sweet claims. Few of his "witnesses" actually speak for themselves. Their memories (culled from memoirs, biographies, fan magazines, trade papers, and archived collections, as well as Sweet's interviews and personal correspondence) are, for the most part, filtered through Sweet's own agenda and gift for storytelling. He exploits their personalities to create characters, and he recklessly fetishizes their behavior for effect. One can almost hear Sweet rejoice as he finds arthritic Joan Morgan sipping milky tea from a safety cup, jack-of-all-trades Ernest Dudley jogging well into his nineties, or former sex kitten Pamela Green eager to show him the contents of her underwear drawer.
The book's title is an allusion to Kenneth Anger's notorious account of filmland debauchery, Hollywood Babylon. But Sweet has loftier aims. He refers throughout to the vulnerability of celluloid and the careless treatment of early negatives in order to draw a correlation between lost films and forgotten movie stars, while emphasizing that the inaccessibility of their work contributed to their cultural abandonment in the first place. According to Sweet, British actors were particularly prone to this fate, for even British film critics and historians dismissed British cinema as being too conservative and boring for serious analysis, let alone preservation. Efforts to halt its destruction or inquire into the lives of its participants were openly discouraged: "Contempt for British cinema," writes Sweet, "was a badge of intellectual seriousness." His project is to overturn this misreading of British cinema by using the interview as a tool to reconstruct the history that lies hidden beneath these layers of myth, bad reputation, and poor archival practices.
Sweet is hardly the first to blaze this path of scholarship. But, whereas other historians of British cinema tend to either focus on industrial aspects, valorize certain auteurs, or engage in canon formation through textual analysis, Sweet calls attention to the role of production personnel who often fall through the cracks of such accounts. In doing so, he paints a picture of scandals and intrigue to offset any notion of the British industry as stodgy and uneventful, recounting enough self-immolations, homosexual love affairs, drug overdoses, and family feuds to make even Kenneth Anger blush. He resurrects dozens of neglected films, if not always successfully examining them himself, then at least enabling that kind of work to be done more extensively in the future. However, while claiming to rescue overlooked subjects and histories, Sweet's book paradoxically attends to some of the most visible and studied subjects in British film (such as Cecil M. Hepworth, Ivor Novello, Basil Dean, Michael Balcon, J. Arthur Rank, and Dirk Bogarde). This occurs partly because Sweet organizes the book around such monumental figures, and partly because his "oral histories" have more to say about those luminaries than their forgotten speakers. In other words, interviewees work less as living evidence than as talking heads in a story that at times narrowly concerns them. They serve as extras when Sweet would like to imagine them as protagonists--even if, on occasion, they add fresh insight to well-trod topics.
Shepperton Babylon consists of ten chapters, bracketed by an introduction and a conclusion, approaching its subject chronologically. Yet the book could
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just as well be sectioned into three distinct parts. Almost like watching the fashions change in a film that covers three decades, the attitudes of the characters in Sweet's narrative are neatly demarcated by period. Those who lived between the Hepworth Manufacturing Company's early experiments with editing and Basil Dean's resignation from the board of Associated Talking Pictures shortly before World War II were uniformly eccentric and adventurous, hopeful for what the new medium could bring them but ultimately either taken down by their excesses (Sweet repeatedly returns to the image of British cinema's acting pioneers snorting cocaine off a glass dance floor) or riddled with disappointment. Once ATP became Ealing Studios and Michael Balcon joined its board, British film workers were suddenly hardnosed pragmatists: "I was struck by their no-nonsense attitudes," Sweet writes about the actresses in Gainsborough's stock company, "their polite refusal to be intoxicated by the sentimental enthusiasms of others" (192). They also understood their limitations, saw filmmaking as a job like any other, and assumed responsibility for the end of their careers. As actor Richard Todd remarks to Sweet, "I never got terribly celluloid in my attitude about things" (253). When the late fifties signaled the end of the British studio system and the start of the most prolific two decades of British exploitation cinema, the actors, directors, and producers chronicled by Sweet became--according to his descriptions--daring, shrewd, and often very troubled. Well aware that their works were as popular as the Angry Young Man films being canonized at the time, they were desperate to have their contributions on record.
Given that Sweet weaves his tale around a staggering number of figures, at times dwelling on the most minute of details, I will not attempt to give a thorough, chapter-by-chapter summary of Shepperton Babylon. It might suffice to say, however, that most stories are in the tragic vein, like that of dancer Nita Foy: after being "picked up" by married actor Donald Calthrop--the blackmailer in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929)--she accidentally set herself on fire in his dressing room. (It is worth noting that Sweet's brief section on Calthrop is actually one of the book's most compelling. While most film encyclopedias cite Foy's death as the end of his career, the actor made thirty films in the next five years. A member of Hitchcock's repertory company at British International Pictures, Calthrop has many surviving works, and Sweet gives ample evidence as to why they should be reevaluated.) Yet Sweet's chapter on the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, "A Short Chapter about Quick Films," and his two chapters on British exploitation cinema, "No Future" and "The Oldest Living Sexploitation Star Tells All," are both troubling and insightful in ways that merit individual assessment.
The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act and the pictures made under it until its expiration in 1938 are without question the most-maligned subjects in British film history. The Act aimed to promote British production by requiring distributors to obtain and exhibitors to show minimum percentages of British films. A measure to protect British filmmakers from the aggressive and unfair American export strategies that allowed U.S. films to dominate the British box office, the Act encouraged producers to flood the market with hastily made low-budget films that took advantage of the quota (hence their derogatory nickname "quota quickies"). In "A Short Chapter about Quick Films," Sweet nobly sets out to defend these films. However, it does not inspire a general sense of confidence in his argument that the definition he provides for the 1927 Act--that it "obliged [distributors] to fund the production of a rising percentage of British and Commonwealth movies before they would be allowed to continue to handle Hollywood films" (103)--is wrong, nor that his first few points draw on newspaper listings, release records, and audience surveys that he declines to footnote. Sweet also relies too heavily on the unsubstantiated claim that the poor quality of the quickies is a myth perpetuated by scholars who haven't bothered to watch them, aiming his attack (rather cowardly through footnoting) at Sarah Street's and Margaret Dickinson's Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927-1984. He is somewhat more convincing in his approach to the films themselves, asserting that the quota quickies have a vitality that more expensive prestige pictures lack. His analysis of Tod Slaughter's quickie films, which retained their vigor and popularity well into the 1940s and are currently available on DVD, supports this. He also points out that the quickies served the British industry well by providing a training ground for several British talents, including Robert Morley, Terrence Rattigan, David Lean, and Vivien Leigh (though she denied it to her death). To be sure, Sweet shows that a reassessment of the surviving quota quickies is necessary, but he fails to manage the task satisfactorily.
Sweet's two chapters on exploitation filmmaking are much more effective and offer the most new information to those interested in British cinema. In "No Future," he points to the conditions that led to the rise of British exploitation, namely the introduction of the "X" certificate, the installation of the Eady Levy that gave a percentage of box-office receipts back to producers to make more movies, the downsizing of studio operations in the United Kingdom, and the appointment of a more liberal, film-friendly censor. Sweet notes that there was little separation between the marketing and distribution of art films and exploitation films, and that most exploitation films reflected popular mores and anxieties. Although these observations are hardly groundbreaking, it's illuminating to see them discussed in the British context. Particularly striking is the way Sweet responds to the poor critical reputation of British exploitation filmmakers as compared to their foreign counterparts. After an initial discussion of the "low-brow" works of Richard Attenborough and Christopher Lee, Sweet focuses on interviewees: producer Tony Tenser (Naked as Nature Intended [1961], Repulsion [1965], Witchfinder General [1968]), director Pete Walker (School for Sex [1968], The House of Whipcord [1974], Frightmare [1975]), and their numerous films. Similarly, "The Oldest Living Sexploitation Star Tells All" recounts the careers of the aforementioned Pamela Green (Peeping Tom [1960], Naked--As Nature Intended [1961]) and producer/director John M. East (Queen of the Blues [1979], Emmanuelle in Soho [1980]), as well their friends and collaborators. The most notable of these is Mary Millington, whose suicide East turned into the exploitation "documentary" Mary Millington: True Blue Confessions in 1980. For Sweet, East brings Shepperton Babylon full circle, as he is the grandson of silent actor John Marlborough East, who is briefly mentioned at the book's beginning. The younger East was also a film historian himself, having written a book on his family and conducted several interviews with early filmmakers, many of which he eagerly passed on to Sweet before his death. However, as the self-proclaimed illegitimate son of actor Henry Edwards (who, together with his wife Chrissie White, was Britain's most celebrated acting couple), East also embodies the seedier side of the British film industry that Sweet is all too eager to depict at the expense of its undervalued and unconventional artistry.
Ultimately, what makes Shepperton Babylon so disappointing is its failure to make good on Sweet's promise to reverse British cinema's bland image. Rather than emphasizing the unique attributes of his subjects' works, Sweet hammers home the eccentricity of their lifestyles, producing less a work of historical inquiry than one of gossipy journalism. However, if one approaches the book for what it is and not what it professes to be, Shepperton Babylon provides not only a titillating read but a checklist of obscure films and filmmakers deserving of critical study.
D'Arminio, Aubry Anne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
D'Arminio, Aubry Anne. "Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema." Moving Image, vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, p. 131+. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A156448375/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0825147f. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A156448375
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REVIEW: Inventing the Victorians
M2 Best Books.
(June 19, 2003): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 Normans Media Ltd. http://www.m2.com/m2/web/page.php/contactus
Full Text:
M2 BEST BOOKS-(C)2000-2003 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD
There is a certain image that has been created about the Victorians, but is it something created afterwards, to make our own time seem better than it is in comparison?
Some of the images of Victorians we have created over the years depict them as prudish people, living in a patriarchal society where women were dominated by men.
Matthew Sweet is challenging the established view in "Inventing the Victorians", claiming that they may in fact have been more liberal and less neurotic than we are, despite claims to the contrary.
It is regarded as fairly common knowledge that the Victorians wrapped piano legs in fabric for modesty. Sweet however documents that this was an idea introduced in a book about America and that neither there nor in England was it likely to have been something that people actually did - instead it was seen as a ridiculous metaphor for prudery.
We who regard ourselves as 'modern people' also express horror at the so-called displays of 'freaks' that were common in the Victorian period. Sweet explores this phenomenon and points out that the people who were on these shows - the giants, the dwarves, the people with malformed bodies - were not called freaks in their own period and were regarded as professionals, often earning more than other performers and being invited to do after-dinner talks.
Sweet also questions the view of the Victorian era as a time when women were dominated by men - was it not during this period that they started working outside the homes in the budding industries and took the first steps toward voting and entering politics, to mention but a few changes.
Adding to the other examples the list of things that the Victorians invented and enjoyed, I am starting to feel that Sweet has a point. Is a lot of what is regarded "common knowledge" about Victorians actually not really true at all?
The idea of the book is a good one and the information is interesting, but in places, Sweet's writing style grates as the text feels heavy and more repetitive than necessary.
It is however well researched and Sweet punctures one idea of the period after another, replacing the image of the people who lived back then with another, much more positive one - and one that puts our period in a much less favourable light.
This book is not the easiest of reads in some respects, as the print is small and the contents factual, but it is well worth the effort and no academic knowledge is needed.
CONCLUSION: A well-researched book that deftly punctures some of our time's favourite ideas about the Victorians. Recommended.
Title: Inventing the VictoriansAuthor: Matthew SweetPublished by: Faber and Faber LimitedISBN: 0-571-20663-8Price: GBP8.99Reviewer: Ann Sundqvist
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"REVIEW: Inventing the Victorians." M2 Best Books, 19 June 2003. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A103653824
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=21ba6527. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A103653824
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Review: Books: Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema Matthew Sweet Faber pounds 9.99
The Observer (London, England).
(Feb. 12, 2006): Arts and Entertainment: p27. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Full Text:
Byline: SARAH CASTLETON
British cinema, from the silent Twenties to the sexploitation of the Seventies, has been dismissed as laughable and staid, a view remaining largely unchallenged. Using an assembled 'Babel of voices' from British film, Sweet seeks to restore with words what failing memory and the deterioration of celluloid have largely destroyed. Alongside juicy scandal involving enough sex, drugs and cold blood to rival anything in our gossip pages (did Ivor Novello really have a one-night stand with Winston Churchill?) what emerges is a vibrant, creative and eccentric world peopled by passionately dedicated men and women. Though many of their tales are tragic, Sweet's humour and sense of the absurd turn this book into a celebration rather than wake.
SARAH CASTLETON
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: Books: Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema Matthew Sweet Faber pounds 9.99." Observer [London, England], 12 Feb.
2006, p. 27. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A142105757/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a9f55594. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A142105757
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Movies that we all want to forget ... REVIEW
Mail on Sunday (London, England).
(Jan. 30, 2005): News: p75. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 Associated Newspapers Limited http://www.associatednewspapers.com/
Full Text:
Byline: ROGER LEWIS
Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds Of British Cinema by Matthew Sweet Faber [pounds sterling]12.99 .[pounds sterling]10.99 (0870 165 0870)***
Possibly inspired by Kenneth Tynan's classic rediscovery of Louise Brooks, a star of the silent screen whom he found living in poverty and neglect, Matthew Sweet has made it his mission to track down the ancient performers, directors and producers from what he calls the 'forgotten areas of our cinematic heritage'.
Unfortunately, when Sweet encounters his ancient survivors, none has much to impart: 'Renee Gadd had no recollections about this period of her career . .
.' His cast is gaga - one so old he lost his virginity to Oscar Wilde.
Where Ken Tynan found forgotten masterpieces such as Pabst's Lulu, starring Brooks, Sweet finds himself watching the entire back-catalogue of Norman Wisdom on DVD. 'It is hard to find anybody over the age of 12 who has a good word for Norman Wisdom,' he says without fear of contradiction.
Though there is a vague chronological underswell - we begin with silent movies and end somewhere in the Seventies - this is not a history book or an objective survey. Too much is omitted.
Regarding the moguls alone, we have plenty on J. Arthur Rank and Michael Balcon, but there is little on Alexander Korda - and nothing at all on the Boultings or Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas, of Carry On fame.
Shepperton Babylon seems mostly to be about what catches Sweet's sardonic eye. It is a treasure-house of personal opinions and eccentric gossip.
A typical passing reference is to Sydney Chaplin, half- brother of Charlie, who raped a chorus girl; or the potted biography of Ivor Novello, who allegedly tried to seduce Churchill.
('Very musical,' commented Sir Winston, cryptically.) Sweet is rude about Kenneth More ('gross and bullying . . .
insufferably smug'), Dirk Bogarde ('a sleazy, leather-clad, nancy-boy sadist'), John Mills ('he can't act') and Richard Attenborough ('he sits in his own private screening room, weeping at his own movies'), but he quite fails to persuade us of the alternative merits of Gracie Fields and George Formby.
The tawdry and the tacky particularly obsess Sweet. He is a connoisseur of anything with mad priests and nymphomaniacs in it. No wonder, then, that Christopher Lee found him irritating: all Sweet wanted to talk about was Night Of The Blood Monster.
And poor Richard Todd, confronted with his dud-studded CV (the nadir being a horror picture with Britt Ekland called Asylum), eventually had to concede that his film career went 'down the pan'.
Sweet found the tables turned, however, when he visited Sir Norman Wisdom on the Isle of Man. His time with the elderly comedian, whose last major film role was in 1969, felt 'as much like a hostage crisis as an interview'. Sweet feared he'd never get away alive from the incessant mawkishness and over rehearsed self-justification.
Aged household names aside, Sweet has visited nonagenarian pornographers, nightclub promoters, former soubrettes and music-hall artistes.
There's Victoria Hopper, found 'in a remote cottage on Romney Marsh' and who 'can't act for toffee'; the late Phyllis Calvert, who confesses she became an actress 'entirely for the money'; and Tony Tenser, who latterly lived in Southport, 'trading in wicker chairs'. Before that, Tenser had produced a sex comedy in which Roy Kinnear played a character called Benny U. Murdoch, owner of BUM Films Ltd.
Sweet clearly adores these British equivalents of Ed Wood, by common consent the world's worst filmmaker.
I particularly enjoyed Sweet's enumeration of people's gruesome exits - the many starlets and failed actors who faded away in cheap hotels with a bottle of pills; or who became domestic servants in Belgravia; or whose cars collided with milk lorries in Tottenham Court Road.
I find a Larkinesque poetry in these forgotten people and their lost dreams. Sweet, by contrast, affects to believe it is their work that counts.
He wants to give 'serious critical consideration to areas formerly anguishing beneath the sea of critical contempt' - to the likes, for instance, of The Ups And Downs Of A Handyman, Come Play With Me and Confessions Of A Window Cleaner.
He asserts: 'Such productions, irrespective of their poor quality and vulgarity, require restoration to the narrative of our national cinema.'
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Nonsense. It is disingenuous to pretend that this stuff has merit. I know this for a fact because I've seen most of them: as an insomniac, I watch every bad film that's on at 3am.
In investing junk with meaning and importance, Shepperton Babylon is a high-camp exercise, both brilliant and absurd. It would almost have you believe that Robin Askwith was a more intriguing figure in the annals of acting than Laurence Olivier.
The truth is that if many British films were lost, there was no conspiracy or failure of imagination; it is simply that they weren't any good.
There's no need for lamentation. That the negatives were melted down to make false teeth and celluloid combs demonstrates laudable critical acumen. ROGER LEWIS
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Movies that we all want to forget ... REVIEW." Mail on Sunday [London, England], 30 Jan. 2005, p. 75. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A127917641/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fcd38e02. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A127917641
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PAPERBACKS
Mail on Sunday (London, England).
(Mar. 5, 2006): News: p66. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated Newspapers Limited http://www.associatednewspapers.com/
Full Text:
Byline: SIMON SHAW
Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet Faber & Faber [pounds sterling]9.99 .[pounds sterling]9.99 freep&p (0870 165 0870) A Jealous Ghost by A. N. Wilson Arrow [pounds sterling]6.99.[pounds sterling]6.99 free p&p (0870 165 0870) .... .... I Choose To Live by SabineDardenne Virago [pounds sterling]6.99 .[pounds sterling]6.99 free p&p (0870 165 0870) ElectricUniverse by David Bodanis Abacus [pounds sterling]7.99 .[pounds sterling]7.99 free p&p (0870 1650870) .... It is acknowledged by film-writers and cultural critics that even at its best, British cinema has rarely been more than a pale imitation of Hollywood.
But this is nonsense, says Sweet in this entertaining history of British cinema.
Britain's pioneer filmmakers were not just prolific, they were also inventive and technically sophisticated. Sweet has actually watched many of these forgotten films, something few critics have bothered to do. He has also tracked down the industry's survivors and recorded their reminiscences.
They're fascinating.
Sallie is an American postgraduate who has come to London to write a thesis on Henry James. Short of cash, she takes a job as a nanny, working for a lawyer whose two motherless children rattle around in a vast English country house.
This situation is eerily similar to the plot of James's ghost story The Turn Of The Screw, and it doesn't take long for Sallie, who may have a screw loose herself, to start hearing and seeing things. Wilson's ingenious novel is packed with sharp social observation and sly wit.
Sabine Dardenne was 12 when she was kidnapped by the notorious Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux. She was kept in the cellar of his house for months, at first on her own and then with Laetitia Delhez. They were raped repeatedly.
Dutroux kidnapped six girls, of whom only Sabine and Laetitia survived. To say it must have taken courage to write this book is an understatement. Sabine relives her ordeal in unbearable detail, and doesn't flinch.
If a time-traveller from ancient Rome had been transported to Chicago in the 1850s he would have recognised the essentials of everyday living, says Bodanis in this fascinating work of popular science. But if he had come back 50 years later, he would have found the place unrecognisable.
The reason, says Bodanis, is that the harnessing of electricity had utterly changed the way humans live. Without the pioneering work of a handful of visionaries and scientists, the world as we know it would be a much poorer - not to say darker - place.
SIMON SHAW
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"PAPERBACKS." Mail on Sunday [London, England], 5 Mar. 2006, p. 66. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A142850316
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7239304e. Accessed 6 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A142850316
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"Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 50+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575693/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=471b4353. Accessed 6 June 2018. "Sweet, Matthew: OPERATION CHAOS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461318/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=9962f8e9. Accessed 6 June 2018. Pitt, David. "Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 35. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=672c372f. Accessed 6 June 2018. Mullen, Alexandra. "Step right up." New Criterion, May 2002, p. 76+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A86743315/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=78fb4fe8. Accessed 6 June 2018. HUGHES, KATHRYN. "Dumb, dumber, dumbest." New Statesman, 5 Nov. 2001, p. 51. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80023140/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=18ed2541. Accessed 6 June 2018. Bray, Christopher. "Love letter." New Statesman, 21 Feb. 2005, p. 52+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A130056227/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=43734653. Accessed 6 June 2018. Ridley, Jane. "Inventing The Victorians. (Fresh air in the hothouse)." Spectator, 17 Nov. 2001, p. 48. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80682359/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=14bb8cf6. Accessed 6 June 2018. Adair, Gilbert. "Typically, touchingly British." Spectator, 26 Feb. 2005, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A130213574/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=49d4e376. Accessed 6 June 2018. Mason, Mark. "The Ritz in the Blitz." Spectator, 3 Dec. 2011, p. 45+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A274305289/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1d9b1155. Accessed 6 June 2018. Sweet, Matthew. "Inventing the Victorians. (Nonfiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2001, p. 1603. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80899692/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6e37ee2a. Accessed 6 June 2018. "Inventing the victorians. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 12 Nov. 2001, p. 50. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80372003/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=296e23a9. Accessed 6 June 2018. Tappin, Nigel. "Inventing the Victorians. (History)." Library Journal, Dec. 2001, p. 147+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A81222875/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d3bce5f6. Accessed 6 June 2018. "Inventing the Victorians." Contemporary Review, Apr. 2002, p. 255. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A85532667/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=48ea4271. Accessed 6 June 2018. Carroll, Mary. "Inventing the Victorians. (History)." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2001, p. 627. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80852107/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=59872f33. Accessed 6 June 2018. D'Arminio, Aubry Anne. "Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema." Moving Image, vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, p. 131+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A156448375/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0825147f. Accessed 6 June 2018. "REVIEW: Inventing the Victorians." M2 Best Books, 19 June 2003. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A103653824/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=21ba6527. Accessed 6 June 2018. "Review: Books: Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema Matthew Sweet Faber pounds 9.99." Observer [London, England], 12 Feb. 2006, p. 27. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A142105757/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a9f55594. Accessed 6 June 2018. "Movies that we all want to forget ... REVIEW." Mail on Sunday [London, England], 30 Jan. 2005, p. 75. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A127917641/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fcd38e02. Accessed 6 June 2018. "PAPERBACKS." Mail on Sunday [London, England], 5 Mar. 2006, p. 66. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A142850316/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7239304e. Accessed 6 June 2018.
  • The Independent
    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-man-in-black-more-like-1095309.html
    Word count: 1839

    The man in black, more like
    The author of `The Woman in White' had an unconventional private life, including a fantasy marriage to an 11-year-old. As a new novel by Wilkie Collins is published more than a century after his death, Matthew Sweet explores an enigma of Victorian letters

    Matthew Sweet
    Sunday 23 May 1999 00:02
    0 comments

    W ilkie Collins - author of The Woman in White, master of Victorian sensation fiction, laudanum-junkie and sexual bohemian - has been dead since 1889. But 1999 is turning out to be a very productive year for him. He has a new novel out this week, a bloodthirsty tale of Tahitian child- sacrifice which was thought lost for nearly a hundred years. Next month his collected letters are published for the first time, and will afford new insights into his creative processes, his unconventional private life (a mistress at home and his "morganatic" family installed round the corner) and his peculiar relationship with a young girl named Nannie Wynne, with whom, through correspondence, he lived out a bizarre fantasy marriage.

    Collins's family life was clandestine and complex. It was claimed that his first mistress, Caroline Graves, had met the author in mysterious circumstances. "She had accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a villa in Regent's Park," a family friend recalled in the 1890s. "There for many months he kept her prisoner under threats and mesmeric influence of so alarming a character that she dared not attempt to escape until, in sheer desperation, she fled from the brute who, with a poker in his hand, threatened to dash her brains out."

    Doubtless the truth was rather more prosaic. Graves moved into Gloucester Place with Collins in about 1858. Ten years later she left him to marry a distiller named Joseph Clow - possibly in protest at her precarious social position, or at her lover's simultaneous relationship with another woman. Collins met his second mistress, Martha Rudd, on a trip to Norfolk in 1864, when she was 19. By 1868 he had set her up in Bolsover Street under the name of Mrs Dawson. Here she bore the novelist two children (a third, Charley, was born at Taunton Place in 1874).

    This is where the domestic arrangements get really ticklish: In 1871 Graves returned to Gloucester Place, and from this point the two households lived parallel, autonomous lives. When Collins took his familial entourage on holiday to Ramsgate, he booked them into separate lodging houses.

    Collins's elaborate double life had tough consequences for his descendants. "The illegitimacy did make life difficult for the family," explains the author's great-granddaughter, Faith Clarke (nee Dawson). "It stopped my aunts marrying, or having people round to the house. When I was young I was aware that there was something strange in the family history, and that people would stop talking about it when I was around. They certainly wouldn't discuss it in my presence." It was only when her husband, William Clarke, began researching his book The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins that she learnt the details of her family's concealed past.

    "The touch that's always appealed to me is that my surname, Dawson, is fictional. Nobody knows why he chose it. He might even have taken it from the name of the doctor in The Woman in White." Clarke doesn't blame Collins for his unwillingness to make an honest woman of her great-grandmother. "All I've read and heard about him first-hand from my family has convinced me that he was a warm, generous man, and very sympathetic towards children."

    Which brings us to Collins's mock-marriage with the 11-year-old Anne le Poer Wynne, nicknamed Nannie. The correspondence between the young girl and the 61-year-old novelist began in 1885, when she and her widowed mother were living in the quiet London suburb of Little Venice. Francis Beard, who was doctor to all three, may have introduced them. Over the next four years Collins wrote to Nannie twice a month, maintaining the conceit that they were a married couple. "Dear and admirable Mrs Collins," he enthused, "Mia sposa adorata." They swapped photographs, and Nannie sent her admirer flowers and Christmas cards.

    A late-20th-century social worker casting an eye over these letters would probably argue for an exclusion order to be slapped on their author sharpish. Especially, perhaps, in the light of Collins's advice to Nannie that she combat the effects of hot weather by adopting "the costume of a late Queen of the Sandwich Islands - a hat and feathers and nothing else".

    William Clarke, who has co-edited the letters, is sceptical about the possibility of any Dodgsonian irregularities in this relationship. Wynne family descendants have assured him that Nannie's mother was well aware of the correspondence, and that she accompanied her daughter on visits to Gloucester Place. "It's a charming correspondence. I don't think it has any sexual overtones," he argues - though his publisher is putting a rather different spin on the story.

    Heart and Science contains a portrait of a relationship between an older man and a young girl that reads like a Gothicised account of Collins's Little Venice mock-romance. Its principal villain is Dr Benjulia, a sadistic vivisectionist who keeps a monkey in his coat and enjoys a strange intimacy with a precocious 10-year-old named Zo. "One of his favourite recreations was tickling her.... He put two of his big soft finger-tips over her spine, just below the back of her neck, and pressed on the place. Zo started and wriggled under the touch. He observed her with as serious an interest as if he had been conducting a medical experiment...." Of course the reader is led to believe that if Zo is ever foolish enough to enter Dr Benjulia's windowless laboratory, she will be dissected in a jiffy.

    The official debut this week of Iolani; or Tahiti as It Was provides another gloss on this aspect of Collins's fiction. The novel - written during office hours when Collins was apprenticed to a tea merchant in the Strand - is set in Polynesia before European contact. It's the story of a high priest fixated upon the idea of sacrificing his illegitimate child to the gods. The clandestine murder of unwanted children is a theme that Victorian readers would have found creepily familiar. (One contemporary newspaper report suggested that "an uneasy persuasion pervades the public that their masters connive, to a frightful extent, in the surreptitious disposal of the bodies of stillborn and illegitimate children, packed like lumber into cheap coffins".)

    Iolani demonstrates that even in his apprentice work Collins was formulating the idea that would dominate his mature output, and perhaps informed his disinclination to officialise his family relationships. The domestic sphere, the fiction argued, could easily become a source of unease and danger. "The secret theatre of home", he called it: a stage upon which dark family dramas were played out, where atrocities might be committed without the neighbours suspecting a thing. As Henry James commented, "To Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors."

    The households featured in his novels are invariably sinister, freakish institutions: the domestic spaces of The Woman in White (1860) are occupied by a mouse-fancying, bon-bon-guzzling Italian gangster, a moustached lady, an effeminate hypochondriac who locks himself away with his collection of etchings, and his French valet. In Poor Miss Finch (1872), the congenitally blind heroine shares her home with the widow of a South American revolutionary and a pair of identical twins - one a suave landscape artist and the other a mimsy epileptic who has turned himself blue by drinking silver nitrate.

    The Law and the Lady (1875) offers the oddest domestic scene in the Collins canon. In this novel the newly wed Valeria Woodville's crusade to clear her husband's name of murder forces her to pay several visits to the home of a paraplegic maniac named Miserrimus Dexter. Dexter is as seductively weird as any character in fiction. When not torturing his transvestite servant, Ariel, with a bizarre S & M game involving string and fairy-cakes, or careering around the house in his wheelchair declaring himself to be Napoleon, he is pan-frying exotic mushrooms for the heroine or making passes at her by leaping into her lap. This kind of thing just doesn't happen in George Eliot.

    And unlike his friend and occasional collaborator Charles Dickens, Collins rarely wrote of the home as that Christmas-card-cosy place where reformed misers handed out geese to disabled children. Home was where your wife might murder you with poisoned lemonade; where a letter might arrive to tell you that your father is not who he has claimed to be; where your doctor might watch you slowly die to satisfy his scientific curiosity. Joseph Conrad had to send his hero down the Congo to encounter the worst forms of human depravity. Collins, we now know, looked for it in an imaginary Tahiti. His published work suggests that he eventually found it on Acacia Avenue. A strange conclusion for a man whose domestic life seems to have given him the best of both worlds.

    `Iolani; or Tahiti as It Was' is published by Princeton University Press on Tuesday. `The Letters of Wilkie Collins' are published by Macmillan in June. Matthew Sweet's new critical edition of `The Woman in White' is published by Penguin Classics in October.

    Sentimental nonsense or the predatory workings of a dubious mind? Wilkie Collins was 64, `Nannie' 14 when he wrote this to her:

    Dearest Mrs Wilkie

    Don't bully me. Mother-in-law will tell you that I am already prostrate. Besides, I don't approve of your conduct since I have been away. I hear you have got tall. Have you forgotten that I am short? News has also reached me that you have got a waist. Have I got a waist? And, greatest disappointment to me of all, I am positively assured that your back hair is on the top of your head. My hair hangs on my shoulders. I have not had my hair cut for the last four months to please you. A good wife follows her husband's example. What right have you to hide the top of your head from Me. I have a right to see (and, if I like, admire) the top of your head. There may be one excuse for you. Are you getting bald on the top of your head? If that is the case, I pity and forgive you. When I come to see you, I will bring with me "Mrs Allen's Hair Restorer" and rub it in myself. But don't allude to "Galantine and Truffles" - your mother, your excellent mother, will tell you why. With all your faults, I love and adore you. WC
    More about: | Andrew Lloyd Webber | Cross-dressing | Mushrooms | Venice

  • Huff Post
    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/cynthia-ellis/penguin-classics-releases_b_753658.html
    Word count: 1414

    Penguin Re-Releases The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
    headshot
    By Cynthia Ellis

    2010-10-08-WIWuse.jpg

    The Woman in White (Penguin Classics) by Wilkie Collins.
    Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Matthew Sweet.
    Cover design by Coralie Bickford-Smith, Illustration (c) Despotica.

    The Woman in White ruined my Hawaiian vacation.

    My beloved Nora Ephron had spoken of it in terms so glowing (“probably the most rapturous book of my adult life”) that I was forced to drag along the 609 page hardcover just in case there was the very small chance that I might enjoy it. At the very least I would feel virtuous for having carried it. Until then, my interest in 1860 began and ended with Abraham Lincoln. Approximately halfway through the second chapter, it dawned on me that I was completely obsessed. If you are in Kauai, trapped underwater in a small metal cage being dangled in front of sharks, trying not to stick out your fingers or toes lest your appendages be mistaken for the tempting snacks the boat captain has thrown overboard and you are still wondering what will happen to Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco instead of your life — then you realize you are reading a truly engrossing novel.

    Penguin Classics has just released a new hardcover of The Woman in White, edited and introduced by Matthew Sweet, a journalist and critic who wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilkie Collins at Oxford. First published in 1859 in weekly installments, The Woman in White was an overnight sensation. It was a favorite family dinner topic, bets were waged over the outcomes, and single men fell passionately in love with its heroine. It was an instant hit then and deserves to be one again.

    Modern entertainment is preoccupied with sensory perception. Current films like Avatar are popular because they make us feel like we are actually living the story. Video games are dismissed as old hat unless the joystick actually vibrates our hands until they tremble with fear and excitement. One reason this book has never been out of print is that it gives you physical sensations along with the mental stimulation. It is a literary roller-coaster ride.

    The public has been somewhat aware of The Woman in White for a long time, even if not in its original form. It has been made into film, television, theatre and a comic strip. Andrew Lloyd Webber even made in into a musical based on the book. It premiered in London’s West End and on Broadway and played as recently as 2006 after being seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

    And yet, most Americans are aware of Wilkie Collins simply because Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick named their son “James Wilkie.” When I tell this to Matthew Sweet, he says, “She should play one of his heroines!” A great idea. And perhaps it would bring Collins to a wider audience. For all of The Woman in White‘s incarnations in the creative field, Collins is still lesser known than his contemporary and mentor, Charles Dickens.

    Reading The Woman in White is not unlike being in a cage surrounded by sharks, if you could somehow eat crème brulee at the same time. It is exquisitely uncomfortable. Sweet compares it to a Hitchcock film, and notes that it is rare for modern literature to engage the physical body as well as the mind. Not only did the book touch the minds of its readers, he says in his introduction, “it aimed to sensationalize them — to make them catch their breath, their hearts beat faster, their eyes move more feverishly over the page.”

    This novel may have been dismissed in the past as mere entertainment. But Collins raises social issues that are no less viable today and he is a champion of women’s rights. Sweet notes that Collins made the fascinating move of giving his male characters female traits and his female characters typically male attributes. Collins’s heroine, Marian Halcombe, is one of the smartest and bravest characters in literature. She is respected and adored by all who know her, she is not good-looking, and our villain is in love with her. An ugly, kind and brilliant heroine who still has sensual allure? Revolutionary! John Sutherland called her, “One of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction.” And Sweet calls the relationship between Count Fosco and his wife “one of the most chilling portrayals of domestic violence we’ve ever seen.”

    The book was originally published in a weekly literary magazine called All the Year Round created by Charles Dickens. Magazine sales actually increased when The Woman in White followed The Tale of Two Cities, which no doubt must have been a hard act to follow. The novel was written and published in increments and needed to be suspenseful because Collins had to ensure that readers would buy the next installment. The New York Review of Magazines recently attributed the outrageous success of current gossip weeklies such as People, US Weekly, and Star to following the golden rule enacted by this type of literary serialization: “always always end on a cliffhanger.” Collins’s writing strategy seems to have been our first “Brangelina”!

    There is now a passionate debate over whether Collins’s famous motto — “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em weep, make ‘em wait” — is actually his, but it fits this book perfectly as we await the verdict. Make ‘em argue? The novel was the first of its kind, a “sensation” novel, the alarming and thrilling Gothic literature style merged with a psychological domesticity. Family drama with a twist. Collins called it “the secret theatre of home.” It showed that of all the evils and terrors in the world, the most terrifying can happen right where we live. Henry James said, “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own door.” Without Collins, domestic dramas like Mad Men, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos wouldn’t have been possible.

    Instead of giving us what we are used to in literature — a reliable narrator — Wilkie Collins gives us several narrators and none of them are reliable! They each give us their testimonies like witnesses in a criminal trial. Sweet says, “The narrators are attacked, drugged, tricked and terrified.” Their altered states make the reader equally vulnerable and on edge. When our narrator stops speaking and suddenly the next page is blank because they have been poisoned or overcome, the result is completely destabilizing and enthralling. At one point in the story there is a twist so shocking that readers have been known to actually drop the book. Sweet describes it as something “passed to its readers like an electrical charge.”

    Nothing about the novel turns out to be what we expect, including Count Fosco, one of the best-written villains in fiction. An obese Italian Count who loves vanilla bon-bons, white mice, songs from Naples and feeds lethal chemistry experiments to those who cross him, Sweet hilariously calls him, “The First Godfather.”

    The Woman In White can be so all-consuming that everyday life goes unnoticed. Or even more incredibly, unwanted. Just as Avatar fans claimed that life felt unlivable once they took off their 3-D glasses, the Amazon reader reviews for this book are show that people can’t put The Woman in White down. They are burning their dinners, late for the babysitter, and missing work the next day because they were up all night reading. Nora Ephron was distracted in the sound booth while making million-dollar movies, and I risked life as Captain Hook.

    Apparently, ordinary civilians are not alone in wanting to do nothing except finish The Woman in White. Just as Obama read Jonathan Franzen’s new novel on vacation, when the book was first published, according to Sweet, “The future Prime Minister William Gladstone cancelled a theatre engagement in order to continue reading it.”

    Buy The Woman in White online: http://www.amazon.ca/Penguin-Classics-Woman-Wilkie-Collins/dp/0141192429

    Matthew Sweet on BBC Radio: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/presenters/matthew_sweet.shtml

    Follow Cynthia Ellis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CynthiaJEllis
    Follow Cynthia Ellis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CynthiaJEllis
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  • The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/02/historybooks.features
    Word count: 974

    Prude awakenings
    Matthew Sweet wants to put the sex back into the 19th century in his social history, Inventing the Victorians, but does he leave room for anything else?

    David Jays

    Sat 1 Dec 2001 21.51 EST
    First published on Sat 1 Dec 2001 21.51 EST

    Inventing the Victorians
    Matthew Sweet
    Faber £16.99, pp264

    Matthew Sweet's social history of the nineteenth century splashes through popular leisure, tabloid excess, hype and sex to drag the Victorians into the clear light of fun. Oscar Wilde promotes Madame Fontaine's Bosom Beautifier, fills the papers and explores the field of sexual opportunity: in all of which, Sweet argues, he typified his era. Move over, Victoria the eternally unamused - here the Queen figures as palpitating spectator at the theatre, as a delighted partner in a sensual marriage who is often photographed 'laughing like a skunk'.
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    The Victorians felt they lived in tumultuous times that rattled each successive generation into a new world. 'We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world,' wrote Thackeray, 'are like Father Noah and his family out of the ark.' Sweet notes that we elide cultural differences between each decade of the nineteenth century, but replicates this elision. Here, the coming of the railways merely provides brief encounters and carriage pick-ups; the defining schisms over Darwinism are unexplored. Politics and economics don't even make the footnotes, and Gladstone appears only as friend to street-corner working girls.

    Sweet researched heart-racing Victorian sensation novels and edited Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White for Penguin Classics. Inventing the Victorians elaborates the themes of his introduction to that edition, concerned with the 'manic urgency' of Victorian leisure, consumer culture and merchandising. Just as he dismissed moralistic criticism of Collins as 'huffings and puffings', he now scoffs at a whole library of dank Victorian advice on matters sexual, moral and genteel.

    Every so often, like the nerve-jangled protagonist of his favourite sensation novels, Sweet is overcome with the feverish onrush of his narrative and loses his head. He gives way to giddy fantasies about Thomas Hardy eating vanilla ice-cream with a wooden spoon in the back row of the cinema, or passes a passageway 'in which the scrofulous stench of the Elephant Man's skin still seems to hang'.

    The scrupulous cultural historian wrestles the excitable hack, and loses: there are more references to Monica Lewinsky than to Florence Nightingale; he devotes more space to Harold Shipman than to Darwin.

    Sweet's method is to debunk a myth - Prince Albert's genital restraints or the prudish swaddling of piano legs - offer a scattering of detail and a sparkle of modern parallel, and end each chapter just where the discussion should get going.

    He suggests that child-worshippers like Lewis Carroll cannot usefully be described as paedophiles, but offers no corrective frame of reference for the adoration of little girls. Carroll's affectionate correspondence and camerawork seem as queasily cute as Collins's pretend marriage with an 11-year old, and the Victorians themselves were troubled by intimations of anxiety. While we ponder why a cult of innocent childhood so often tendrilled itself with unexpressed sexuality, Sweet marches off to another chapter.

    No reader of Dickens can be unaware that the Victorians were avid for entertainment, adepts of blag and hype, but Sweet wipes the drool off nineteenth-century chins. In his account of early cinema, no one ducks for cover as a train hurtles across the screen, while he enjoyably reinvents the freak show, reclaiming the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, as an 'eminent Victorian'.

    Merrick, alongside Mme Babault the Lobster Claw Lady and Miss Atkinson the Pig Woman, becomes a professional entertainer rather than a cowering victim of exploitation. His audiences are less heartless gawpers than clued-up consumers, enjoying a semi-ironic relationship to tantalising spectacle.

    Sweet claims that we preserve an image of Victorians as fusty antiquities because it makes us feel swankily liberal and modern, like children sniggering at their parents. Principal culprits are the Bloomsbury Group, presented as posturing hypocrites, with Virginia Woolf frequently cited in order to receive a kicking. The text is haunted with demolished buildings, discarded artefacts, even a photograph that makes its subject's face resemble a skull, as if posterity seeks to bury evidence of the lively past.

    Actually, we continually draw parallels with the nineteenth century - currently, in the Tate's exhibition of Victorian nudes and the BBC's adaptation of The Way We Live Now. Even if the Victorians really did bequeath us spam e-mail and tabloid journalism, the clutter of familiarity is far less interesting than their strangeness. In his ardent conclusion, Sweet whimpers: 'We should love them. We should thank them. We should love them.' Couldn't we just think a bit more rigorously about them?

    His picture of sexed-up pleasure seekers leaves as little room for ambiguity as any stereotype of moralists in mutton-chop whiskers. George Eliot (described only by her less familiar real name, Mary Ann Evans) is presented as a corrective of monogamous marriage but Sweet ignores the distress she experienced through her extramarital relationship with George Lewes.

    The tension between conviction and convention is mirrored in the frequent alliance between prurience and moral crusade - the Chartists who subsidised political pamphlets with pornography, or Josephine Butler promoting her campaign against white slavery through the slavering Pall Mall Gazette ('The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon'). Reform is tickled by hucksterism, sexual fascination by shame. Chuck out the sepia by all means, but let the Victorians inhabit their truly fascinating grey area.
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  • Rambles
    http://www.rambles.net/sweet_victorians.html
    Word count: 366

    Matthew Sweet,
    Inventing the Victorians
    (Faber & Faber/St. Martin's Press, 2001)

    We all imagine that we know everything there is to know about the Victorians. We read Dickens and saw the Sherlock Holmes films. We know about Jack the Ripper and the dour old queen who gave the era its name. Everyone can quote ideals of the age. For sex, it was "lie back and think of England," and there are tales of even piano legs being covered. Oh, what a repressed and depressing age.

    WRONG!

    The Victorian age gave us the modern 21st century world, as you'll learn in Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. The information technology age started with the telegraph. Tabloids like the National Enquirer and the like were born in that era. Investigative journalism started there. Sponsorship was common. Reports on the Boer War were "brought to you by Bovril." Product placement was rife in the novels of the day. These novels in turn spawned spin-offs. When The Woman in White was at its height you could buy Woman in White cloaks and bonnets. You could dance to Woman in White waltzes.

    Drugs were sold over the counter. Teething babies were given opium and black treacle in bottles marked Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup. White poppies were cultivated in Surrey. Sideshows and displays like the Elephant Man were precursors of many of our daytime television shows.

    The first Indian restaurant in England opened in the early 1800s about 40 years before the first Fish and Chip shop. They had serial killers but also sensational books on their exploits. They had junk mail -- by telegram. They invented such common items as suburbs, industrial pollution, feminism and the electric iron.

    Dip into this book on any page and you will be amazed. So much that we consider modern was common for people over a century ago.

    This is history at its best -- well written, easily read and offering a million items for the water cooler gossip mill.

    - Rambles
    written by Nicky Rossiter
    published 8 March 2003

    Buy it from Amazon.com.

  • The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/02/highereducation.news
    Word count: 1014

    Ah, Shepperton ...
    It's seedy, but it is our own, says Michael Bracewell. Matthew Sweet's Shepperton Babylon charts the lost worlds of British cinema

    Michael Bracewell

    Fri 1 Apr 2005 18.38 EST
    First published on Fri 1 Apr 2005 18.38 EST
    Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet
    Buy Shepperton Babylon at the Guardian bookshop

    Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema
    by Matthew Sweet
    388pp, Faber, £12.99

    In 1975, when the American edition of Kenneth Anger's notorious exposé of Hollywood's sleaze and scandal, Hollywood Babylon, was finally published, the critic for the New York Times described it as "a delicious box of poisoned bonbons". An anglophile-sounding compliment, faintly reminiscent of the genteel methods of murder employed by the villains of Ealing comedy, it might also serve, 30 years later, as an apt description of Matthew Sweet's historical account of the dark side of 20th-century British cinema.

    Sweet's book is a flawless match of style and subject, in which the anecdotes of cultural history are so finely nuanced as to enter the very consciousness of the episodes they describe. For as Sweet's interest might be said to comprise the "secret" history of British cinema - its lost or forgotten stars, its arcana, bad moods and giddily dichotomous shifts of individual fortune - so there is a quality in his writing that manages to recreate the temper of this fallen world.

    The more we learn of this place - so oddly glamorous in its eccentricity and damp, suburban Englishness - the more apparent it becomes that the tragedy, low farce, melodrama and sheer viciousness that many of British cinema's leading personalities suffered during their careers was infinitely more sensational than many of the dramas that they managed to get on to the screen. In his telling of these stories Sweet revisits the equation identified by Graham Greene in his Journey Without Maps of 1936: "Seediness has a very deep appeal, it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back."

    In this spirit, Sweet begins by describing the fate of junked films in the 1920s: "Forgotten titles were left to moulder in back rooms and storage cupboards, where they sometimes took their revenge by bursting into flames. More often, their volatility was cured by the furnace, or by scrap merchants who juiced old reels of celluloid for the silver and camphor they contained. When the trailblazing producer Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire back catalogue of negatives was bought by a dealer who melted them down into resin for waterproofing the canvas of aircraft wings. Two thousand films, which had showcased Britain's first generations of stars, were liquified, along with other camphor-rich trash: broken tortoiseshell spectacles ... discarded Xylonite dentures."

    Describing his pleasure in the tantalising absences created by history as "occult, not scientific", Sweet explains how he has underpinned the structure of his enquiry with a meditation on the imprint of times past. As such, he could be read as attempting a psychogeography of British cinema, but there is also a vital humour in Sweet's reporting from the frontiers of his research. The more his astonishing cast of stars and producers, technicians and directors lurch from crisis to crisis across the mannered landscape of Britain during the central decades of the last century, the more his tone reflects their insurmountable ability to combine cheerful amateurism or rigid formality with an uninvited presence of the absurd.

    Consider, for example, his bravura account of Britain's official preparations in the 1950s for announcing the imminence of Armageddon: "Had Russia and America unleashed nuclear holocaust upon the world, the preceding days of panic would have triggered the mobilisation of the BBC's wartime broadcasting service. As the world's TV sets would have been swiftly destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies any nuclear explosion, no television service was planned to meet the entertainment needs of those who crawled, unincinerated, from the rubble of Britain. The BBC, however, did identify a number of programmes suitable for broadcast in the last hours of high alert, before the majority of licence-fee payers were blinded by the nuclear flash."

    Sweet uses humour to preserve, as well as critique, the sensibility of his subject matter. Introducing the Lancastrian comedian George Formby, he manages to set the scene in a single line: "Southern England's first view of George Formby was of a gormless, shambling figure with a flat cap slapped backwards on his head, emerging from his mother's chicken coop in a blizzard of feathers ..." Elsewhere the infinite technical complexities of film-making, and the seemingly bottomless ingenuity employed to solve them, provide scenes that bring to mind SJ Perelman's accounts of the lunacy he encountered in his dealings with the big Hollywood studios. "Under Dean's supervision, the ATP construction team worked through the night to plant 10,000 paper crocuses in an artifical Alpine hillside, and Compton and Novello did their best to trip delightedly through a back-projected Tyrolean dance festival."

    In many ways, the lucidity of Sweet's perspective on the covert history of cinema could be said to stand parallel to F Scott Fitzgerald's alternately appalled and seduced relationship with the medium. For in Sweet's descriptions of lives either thwarted, ruined or enriched beyond belief by the power of cinema, there is the same understanding of a fundamental and at times fatal contract with a world of shadows, illusions and artifice.

    Shepperton Babylon treats the fragility of old film as a metaphor for history's often cruel indifference towards those who hoped to be remembered. In his rehabilitation of the forgotten, the unfashionable and the downright odd, and his consequent defence of the same from the dead hand of camp, kitsch and irony, Sweet's history of British cinema restores to the past its right to exuberant hope.

    · Michael Bracewell's England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie is published by Flamingo.
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  • Senses of Cinema
    http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/book-reviews/shepperton_babylon/
    Word count: 1254

    Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet
    Daniel Gritten
    February 2006
    Book Reviews
    Issue 38

    click to buy "Shepperton Babylon" at Amazon.comThe rediscovery of British cinema is underway. The BBC’s recent series The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon was an admirable success. Modules on the native film industry are a staple component of most film studies courses in UK universities. Yet much of British cinema remains “lost” to the popular imagination, non-existent beyond Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, John Grierson, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The academic discipline has been long overshadowed by Rachael Low’s seminal, multi-volume The History of the British Film. Low’s prejudices and preferences are now being challenged by revisionist film historians. Matthew Sweet’s Shepperton Babylon adds to this current trend. His book combines meticulous research with primary interviews to highlight the areas of British national cinema which are worthy of popular and critical re-examination. Like many explorations, Sweet misses as much as he finds. His chapter selections are esoteric. Sections on the forgotten silent star Lillian Hall-Davies and a reconsideration of the Quota-Quickie films of the 1930s fulfil his theme of rediscovery. However, sections on Michael Balcon and the Ealing Studios retread recent critical attention, while the blanket omission of other areas, such as the Hammer Horror cycle, feels arbitrary.

    Shepperton Babylon is primarily a work of oral history (1). This brings with it its own difficulties: questions of memory, accuracy, collection and editing, which are never adequately addressed. However, interviews with forgotten players bring colour and vibrancy to this study. While Victor Perkins asserted that, “British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive” (p.5), this human history tries to breathe life into the corpse.

    Sweet carefully treads the line between academic tome and popular history. He quotes Robert Manvell, who likened British pictures to “faded leaves painted in exquisite detail by a lady in Cornwall” (p. 5). British cinema has been described as a “cottage industry”, lacking the glamour, scandal, or personalities with which the public can engage. Sweet’s title is a clear nod towards Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1975), and while lacking Anger’s tabloid revelations, Shepperton does attempt to rediscover some of these “lost” personalities, places and scandals. Sweet recounts the career of Lillian Hall-Davies, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent stars in 1927, who took her own life in 1933 having failed to make the transition to the “talkies”. Sweet’s enthusiasm and journalistic style make Shepperton Babylon immensely readable. However, he does occasionally slip into hyperbole: George Formby looks like a “human being reflected in a tap” (p. 136).

    Sweet’s best work is his reconsideration of the Quota-Quickies, wrenching them from Low’s dismissive grasp. The 1927 Cinematograph Act meant that a certain proportion of films exhibited in Britain had to be British-made. As Hollywood studios had a back catalogue of films needing distribution, they financed British production for as little as £1/foot of film in order to fulfil the quota. The result was the Quota-Quickie, a name synonymous in the popular imagination with poor quality production. However, Sweet quotes John Grierson:

    The most curious result of the quota war has been the new orientation in British film values. Before it, our eyes were focussed on Denham and the “bigs”. Today the big pictures, like dinosaurs, appear to be too big to be economic and are heading for extinction. We are all interested now in what can be done with fifty thousand pounds…we are even interested in what can be done with twelve thousand pounds. The record of these cheaper pictures is a lot better than the more pretentious ones. I do not mean in production values, I mean better in essence…without any pretension to those values, some of the cheaper pictures have a vitality which luxury ones lack. (p. 108)

    This “vitality” was often grounded in the music hall tradition, with low comedic elements, as producers did not have to worry about export and the Hays Code. While Sweet acknowledges that many associated with Quota-Quickies expressed disdain for them, his interview with producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, a Quota producer in the 1930s, highlights their positives. The exhibition of Quickies exceeded the Quota requirements, suggesting popular appeal. Havelock-Allan argued that the Quota-Quickies offered low-budget training to a generation of British film makers: David Lean, Terrance Rattigan, Robert Morley.

    Sweet’s case-study focus necessitates the omission of some influences, but it is disingenuous to ignore the impact of foreigners on British cinema. While Alexander Korda plays a part, there is little acknowledgement of foreign workers who added to the vivacity of British films: Joseph Losey is mentioned only in passing; others not at all. The influence of Hollywood from the beginning of the 1930s, along with the impact of émigrés, cannot be so conveniently ignored. In When Hollywood Loved Britain (1999), Mark Glancy notes that the “British” film (a film which imagines a cinematic Britain) was often created by those who originated outside of British shores. Indeed, perhaps the most “British” film of the 1930s, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), was produced and directed by the Hungarian Korda, set-designed by his brother Vincent, scripted by their countryman Lajos Biro, while the cinematographer was Frenchman Georges Perinal. The influence of foreigners on the industry was equally as important, and perhaps equally as “lost”, as that of native workers. Indeed, overseas influence, particularly in terms of film finance, remains crucial to the British industry today: Working Title is backed by Universal and Canal-Plus. Even the formerly independent Aardman Animations, with their Ealing-esque sensibilities, have had to endure flying visits from Dreamworks executives.

    Sweet’s real success is to provide a visceral, human link to these lost histories. Shepperton Babylon bridges the gap between the reader, and the celluloid lost to time:

    when Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire back catalogue of negatives was bought by a dealer who melted them down into resin for water-proofing the canvas of aircraft wings. Two thousand films, which had showcased Britain’s first generation of stars, were liquefied […] Next time you see a Spitfire in a museum, run your fingers over its skin. You might be touching a vanished masterpiece. (p. 3)

    The success of the book is Sweet’s ability to connect with the films, histories and personalities which have been so long forgotten. Despite the omissions, Sweet is to be applauded. While by no means comprehensive, his study is passionate, accessible and well-researched. While those who explore such a “lost” world are bound to make mistakes, Shepperton Babylon provides proof that such journeys of rediscovery are worthwhile.

    Shepperton Babylon, by Matthew Sweet, Faber and Faber, London, 2005.

    Click here to order this book directly from
    Endnotes

    Shepperton Babylon was reconceived as a clips-and-commentary documentary for BBC 4. While perhaps lacking depth, the film provides an excellent introduction to British National Cinema, and makes a useful teaching aid.

    Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales by John Fraser
    Le Varianti Trasparenti: I Film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto Rossellini by Elena Dagrada
    About The Author
    Daniel Gritten

    Daniel Gritten is a PhD candidate in the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Bristol. His doctoral work focuses on screenwriting manuals, and the development of screenwriting practice in British cinema during the 1920s and 1930s.
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  • The Independent
    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/shepperton-babylon-by-matthew-sweet-745394.html
    Word count: 1825

    Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet
    The stars of the nascent British film industry were just as likely as their Hollywood peers to be involved in sex and drug scandals. Christopher Fowler enjoys a lively alternative history of the studios

    Sunday 13 February 2005 01:00
    0 comments

    How much of a gap existed between British cinema and Hollywood? Try this simple test. Ask yourself what comes to mind when you think of the word "pilot". In the context of American film, you get Tom Cruise fetishistically suited and booted in Top Gun. In the British equivalent, you get Terence Alexander muttering "Crikey!" and fondling the ends of his handlebar moustache. Try it with "teacher" and one conjures Hollywood's inner-city invigilator Michelle Pfeiffer, while England offers us Joyce "I'm Miss Gossage, call me Sausage" Grenfell.

    How much of a gap existed between British cinema and Hollywood? Try this simple test. Ask yourself what comes to mind when you think of the word "pilot". In the context of American film, you get Tom Cruise fetishistically suited and booted in Top Gun. In the British equivalent, you get Terence Alexander muttering "Crikey!" and fondling the ends of his handlebar moustache. Try it with "teacher" and one conjures Hollywood's inner-city invigilator Michelle Pfeiffer, while England offers us Joyce "I'm Miss Gossage, call me Sausage" Grenfell.

    The British studios were built on London's drab outskirts, and if their films reflect our past, they present us with an image of a lost country: a world of chaps in sensible jumpers and strange hats, misty suburbs, empty roads and grimy canals, coffee-bar girls in peaked sweaters, spivs and dolly birds, jokes about pickled onions and wind, steam trains, bombsites, cheery constables armed with whistles, nurses in suspenders (often in drag), sleepy stationmasters, haughty dowagers, vicars, workmen and bureaucrats. The received wisdom is that British films were constipated, class-ridden, conservative, vulgar and slightly magical, if only because their milieu has been so thoroughly eradicated.

    But is this an inaccurate view, the result of lazy research? British screen history has faded from national consciousness like degrading film emulsion - how can we hope to know what went on behind the scenes when we can't see the scenes themselves? The few films that remain are locked away in BFI vaults or owned by Burbank companies. The handful of forgotten stars who survive are in county nursing homes with scrapbooks of memories, the time for salvaging their stories almost past. So we reach Matthew Sweet's entry-point, following the trail of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon to create a touchstone volume of British back stories that began when the studio lights were turned off. It's a treasure-trove of information and anecdotes.

    However, this echo-title couldn't be more different from its namesake. Hollywood Babylon was a trashy, inaccurate exposé of ugly tinseltown legends, written in a tabloid style that suited Anger's subject. Sweet recognises that gentility has been British cinema's biggest curse, but perhaps its greatest blessing as well. Our scandals were more low-key, our falls from grace less steep, and in any case they have now been scrubbed from memory, so the author has set about recovering the truth from the last witnesses, the performers themselves. And just in time, too: many of his interviewees have since died.

    The story of British film is one of shameless neglect. Just as features from the 1920s were melted down by scrap dealers to make aircraft resin, so their legacies have been ignored. Pompous critics preferred continental art pieces, so who, other than the "bakelite-sniffing nostalgist", is left to wonder about the homegrown talent that once adorned billboards and broadsheets? Who cares that the sensual star Lillian Hall-Davies slashed her throat, or that Ivor Novello had an affair with Siegfried Sassoon, when monochrome British films have vanished so entirely from our lives?

    Well, anyone interested in cinema should care, because Sweet's theory is that British films did not deserve their reputation for stolidity and conservatism, but were passionate, permissive and frequently enthralling. Scenes of sexual ambiguity, degenerate glamour and perverse psychological cruelty were unhampered by a Hays code, and performances were often a reflection of our stars' lives. Novello's sexuality certainly didn't damage his career, nor did the unorthodox sleeping arrangements of a dozen other early British stars, grouped together as "ambisextrous" social radicals. Films like Blondes For Danger, Dial 999 and Splinters in the Navy were produced with great speed and little thought. The smutty double-entendre was a venerable tradition which meant that lines such as: "My sister had a lovely baby born yesterday... what a pity you can't come to the wedding" (from 1932's Josser in the Army) invoked laughter, not outrage. Without such quickies churned out to fill quotas, directors and cinematographers would never have honed their craft, and ultimately there would have been no Guinness, Olivier, Powell or Lean. In this way, the gory melodrama of Sweeney Todd and cross-dressing antics of Old Mother Riley paved the way for In Which We Serve and Great Expectations. It's a persuasive argument that goes against an oft-quoted but rarely verified proposition that British films were simply a load of old music-hall rubbish. Rachael Low's seven-volume History of the British Film was a founding text prejudiced against homegrown product and has hardly been challenged, but Sweet provides plenty of contradicting examples.

    He also feeds our voyeurism by examining British screen scandals. Paul Robeson's films were allegedly blacklisted by Beaverbrook newspapers, not because of the star's race but over his political views. Tremulous actress Meggie Albanesi's death occurred from abscesses caused by multiple abortions. Comedian Sydney Chaplin's career was destroyed by accusations of a horrific rape in which he allegedly bit off an actress's nipple. Hitchcock actor Donald Calthrop's adultery resulted in the object of his desire being immolated backstage in her costume crinoline. Victoria Hopper was moulded in the style of an earlier gifted actress by the lover who had been responsible for her death. Shepperton's cuckolded performers slapped their spouses' faces in fashionable restaurants or lived in blatant ménages à trois, while their lovers snorted cocaine off the glass dance floor of Jack May's nightclub under Maidenhead Bridge. Rampant hedonism filled the lives of these neurasthenic, needy players, and the result was often adultery, under-age seduction, abortion, alcoholism and suicide. Gossip columnists were wittily savage about performers, but abstained from commenting on their off-screen relationships.

    Hollywood stamped its mark on British cinema, using our theatre network to shovel US product on to British screens, a hard-nosed but vampiric practice that continues today. Consequently, our inferiority complex remained in place through the decades, despite the fact that our stars projected wonderfully complex personalities, from the smouldering silken sadism of James Mason to the selfish amorality of Alec Guinness. While Hollywood retreated from adult themes, many of our writers and producers rushed to meet them. Michael Balcon's early Ealing films sought to project an image of Britain as a leader in social reform and a champion of civil liberties, yet we consider the Ealing comedies to be snobbish and insular. This, Sweet points out, is a gross distortion, and if we really want to remind ourselves of backward-looking arrogance we should watch James Bond films. Cinema is best when it's not obviously preaching, and British hits were often the results of accidents. Their directors remained less known, or even reviled. Some would have been better off repairing cars than trying to fix stories; yet they were still capable of producing glorious cinematic moments.

    If Shepperton Babylon has a fault, it lies in Sweet's underplaying of British film heritage. At the start of our film development there was a rush to shoot the classics and the great historical stories; after all, the nation was steeped in the theatre. Arguably, the first great English film is Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). It was followed by films about Nell Gwynne, Rembrandt, Queen Victoria, Henry V, Caesar and Cleopatra and Isadora Duncan. Between them were social comedies, morality plays, dramas, musicals, filmed versions of the great Dickens novels, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, work from Shakespeare, D H Lawrence, A J Cronin, Graham Greene, Terrence Rattigan, John Braine, H G Wells, Nigel Kneale and Joe Orton, but few fit the brief for a mention in this book.

    The casts and crews of such films were roll-calls of the world's greatest cinematic talents. In the 1941 film about the Salvation Army, Major Barbara, I found the following names attached to the production: George Bernard Shaw (who wrote the original play), William Walton, Deborah Kerr, Rex Harrison, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Ronald Neame, Jack Clayton, Arthur Ibbetson, Emlyn Williams, Michael Anderson and David Lean.

    It wasn't all good, of course. British film had some inexplicable stars. Despite the fact that the gormless, shambling George Formby had a face like "a human being reflected in a tap", as Sweet puts it, his wife was paranoid about his leading ladies making passes. The "shrill, eardrum-bursting coloratura" of Gracie Fields "was exactly the kind of screen personality that disinclined Somerset Maugham to spend his evenings in the dark with a carton of Kia-Ora". Sweet's visit to see Norman Wisdom also proves an overpowering experience, "as much like a hostage crisis as an interview", but it's worth remembering that when Wisdom was well directed he could prove revelatory, as in William Friedkin's The Night They Raided Minsky's.

    The Rank Organisation's unerring ability to finance inappropriate productions - from Dirk Bogarde's leather-trousered gay western The Singer not the Song to the Nic Roeg arthouse doodles that horrified their executives - proved the shiniest nail in British cinema's coffin. Even after this, though, there are delicious tales here of the industry in decline. Nudism films like Naked as Nature Intended featured unappetisingly bare performers wandering around Cornwall eating ice creams and gazing at donkeys, while the relaxed new attitude to horror films led to the Scottish actress Sheila Keith making a career-switch into heavy gothic gore at the age of 55. The British actresses interviewed here present themselves as self-deprecating throughout, dismissing their films and treating the idea of the Rank charm school as risible. They were also unconsciously sexy; Patricia Roc's sultriness surfaces even when she's sawing at a loaf of bread with a fag in her mouth.

    Sweet's final leap to 1970s sexploitation and the dumping of great British character actors into softcore titillators suggests that this invaluable book should be at least twice as long. As an elegant dip into the lost past of British cinema, Shepperton Babylon changes the way we view our films - assuming we can ever see them again.
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  • The Telegraph
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3636549/Shepperton-Babylon-the-Lost-Worlds-of-British-Cinema-by-Matthew-Sweet-Flush-with-talent.html
    Word count: 882

    Shepperton Babylon: the Lost Worlds of British Cinema by Matthew Sweet Flush with talent
    J G Ballard reviews

    JG Ballard

    12:01AM GMT 06 Feb 2005

    Film people are the best company, far more interesting than novelists, many of whom manage to be very strange but at the same time deeply dull – a difficult trick to pull off. Perhaps the form of the novel is wrong, too obsessed with time and the distant past, whereas film exists in a perpetual present in which social background counts for nothing and all that matters is what we see on the screen, an intense focus on the miracle of everyday life that turns a cigarette stubbed out in a fried egg or a pair of fractured glasses beside a murdered woman (both Hitchcock trademarks) into a modern myth.

    Given the infinite possibilities of film, it's no wonder that the medium has attracted so many larger-than-life characters, as Matthew Sweet makes clear in his witty and entertaining history of the British cinema. Whether flour-milling tycoon or former strip-club operator, down-at-heel refugee or professional conman, they were all driven by a visionary belief in their personal hotline to the collective unconscious and their power to seize and captivate an audience for two hours on a grey afternoon. Everyone who has strayed even briefly into the film world is bewildered by the titanic self-belief of those involved and their readiness to gamble everything on an impossible dream. Yet without them, no films would ever be made.

    Shepperton Babylon? Alas, no, unless I've been missing something in this pleasant riverside town, which another local resident, the late Bernard Braden, once ironically described as the Malibu of the Thames Valley – a phrase that may have lured me to the place 45 years ago. Sweet comments that he chose Shepperton because its studios are not identified with a particular kind of film and can stand for the British industry as a whole. Many of my neighbours have worked as part-time film extras, and it's always slightly eerie to see parents who once shared the school run wearing Roman armour or a crinoline in television replays of forgotten films.

    As Sweet makes clear, the British film industry has always been Hollywood's poor relation, bedevilled by a chronic shortage of money and the need to scrape and compromise in order to survive. But poor relations have certain advantages. They learn to make do, to rise above their weaknesses and exploit their

    few strengths. Looking back at the production history of British cinema, it is surprising how many of its greatest films in the 1940s and 1950s – Brief Encounter, The Seventh Veil, even The Third Man – were made for remarkably small sums of money. Talent will always out, and British film, while chronically short of money, has always been flush with talent.

    Shepperton Babylon begins with the silent era, and Sweet points out that 80 per cent of the silent films shot in this country have now vanished, along with all memory of their stars and producers. One who is still remembered is Ivor Novello. Born David Davies, he was the son of a Welsh rate collector, looked down on his film work and believed that his stage musicals such as King's Rhapsody and Perchance to Dream would be immortal. They are almost forgotten, but his films, such as The Vortex and The Constant Nymph, made him a world star and offered an intriguing melange of drugs and homosexuality for the mass market.

    With the birth of sound came Ealing Studios and the two great stars of the 1930s, Gracie Fields and George Formby. Fields was born over a Rochdale fish-and-chip shop and, as Sweet remarks, never let anyone forget it. Formby was a far stranger figure, with a screen personality almost deranged in its gormlessness, but like Fields he tapped deeply into the British psyche, for reasons I wouldn't be eager to explore.

    The greatest movie mogul of British film, and the only one to rival his Hollywood counterparts, was J Arthur Rank, the Yorkshire flour-milling tycoon. A teetotaller and devout Methodist, he first became interested in film as a means of spreading his faith. At his peak in the 1950s, Rank employed the greatest British film stars – Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Kenneth More among a hundred others – funded maverick talents such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and supported films as different as Henry V and Passport to Pimlico.

    Rank's films still define what we think of as quintessentially British cinema, a little staid and stuffy but as resolute as Jack Hawkins in an Aran sweater, even in the era of Sexy Beast and Four Weddings and a Funeral. In large part this was thanks to a remarkably relaxed attitude to costs and budgets, in the expectation that Rank-made films would find commercial triumph in America and the world. But freedom came at a price, still being paid for by all those lottery-funded films that never reach the screen. As the director Ronald Neame remembered: "The creative people were entirely in control. We could do whatever we liked, and we did. And we narrowly avoided destroying the Rank Organisation in the process."

  • The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/09/west-end-front-matthew-sweet-review
    Word count: 1281

    The West End Front by Matthew Sweet - review
    The wartime history of London's big hotels is full of rogues and chancers

    Andrew Motion

    Fri 9 Dec 2011 05.00 EST
    First published on Fri 9 Dec 2011 05.00 EST
    Nurse at work in the Savoy Hotel during the second world war
    A nurse at a first aid post in the Savoy Hotel in London during the second world war. Photograph: Felix Man/Getty Images

    In the acknowledgments to The West End Front Matthew Sweet thanks his editor and agent for their "saintly patience as deadline after deadline expired". Confessions like this usually fill readers with dread: they suggest that a book has stewed for too long in its own juices, or gone rigid with delay. In this case it turns out that a long incubation has been nothing but beneficial. Although Sweet's attention is fixed on just one part of the home front, his relish for detail makes it seem emblematic of larger concerns. And although the pace of his narrative is leisured, his tone never loses its champagne sparkle. The book is very good fun, sympathetic to victims as well as bosses, and full of amusing peculiarities.

    The hotels that stand at its four corners are the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Savoy and Claridge's, and they are the theatres for most of its dramas. (A few others occur in less glamorous places: the Charing Cross Hotel, for instance, one of the least regarded buildings in central London.) But rather than let these buildings themselves provide the structure for his chapters, Sweet puts their inhabitants centre-stage, arranging them by type, background, income, allegiance and interest to create a portrait of "the cultural and political life" of the country as a whole. Such an approach, he acknowledges, "might seem an eccentric way of disrupting the customary narratives … But the public and private worlds underwent many strange and sudden revisions" in hotel rooms and corridors, "as did the social structures that shaped them".
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    Sweet's first task is to introduce us to César Ritz (the 13th child of a Swiss shepherd) and Georges Auguste Escoffier ("a blacksmith's son who wore high heels to enable him to see into the pans at the back of the ranges"): the two men who at the end of the 19th century played a crucial role in persuading "the plutocracy and the aristocracy to do something to which they were unaccustomed – eat, drink, smoke and dance in public".

    As long as the age of deference survived, and old and new money flowed in sufficient quantities, the grand new palaces that were the West End hotels sailed through depressions and arms build-ups with the aquiline calm of Cunard liners slicing through the waves of the Atlantic. With the outbreak of the second world war, however, it looked as though their voyage might be over. In fact, with a mixture of expediency, stubbornness and good fortune (they weren't bombed to bits, which admittedly would have been difficult in the case of the iron-clad Dorchester), they quickly and ingeniously adapted to straitened times.

    Their survival depended as much on clients as controllers, as Sweet enjoys showing. Appropriately (because it gives his book a more definite shape), controllers get first shout. The opening chapter, "Aliens", relates the history of Loreto Santarelli, the restaurant manager of the Savoy who had the reputation of going to quite extraordinary trouble for his diners (he once procured an Indian elephant festooned with purple and cream garlands to entertain the Maharaja of Rajpipla). None of his pains was proof against British xenophobia: he was arrested by Special Branch in the summer of 1939 on suspicion of being a spy.

    Santarelli's story – and this is typical of Sweet's book as a whole – then veers away from the Savoy, to include an account of imprisonment, eventual release, subsequent breakdown and early death: it is a story of snobbism that makes the bright lights in the big city look distinctly garish. The same blend of revelry and resentment occurs in several later chapters: in fact it gives the book its tone, and becomes the reason why, for all its high jinks, it feels like serious history.

    In "Reds", for instance, we hear about the communist Max Levitas (a councillor in Stepney after the war), who led a march on the Savoy in 1940 to complain about the poor provision of shelters for people living in the East End during the blitz, compared with those provided for the rich in the West End. When Basil Woon later wrote about the protest in Hell Came to London, he claimed the demonstrators dispersed "before they [could] make real inroads into the sandwiches". Levitas, interviewed by Sweet, remembers 20 marchers staying the night, and in the morning having tea at the hotel's expense. "Two eggs. Ham. Plenty tea. Plenty toast. I'd had a good night's kip there too. It was a good night's work."

    A different sort of injustice emerges in "Brigades", where Sweet gives us a tour of the kitchens, and highlights the difference between what the diners saw above ground, and what happened out of sight. Clement Freud, who worked in the kitchens of the Dorchester in 1941, remembered "a hell-hole of a huge dark dank building built regardless of inconvenience to staff". Sweet ornaments this by adding with a characteristic flourish: "Here, apprentices were routinely locked inside fridges, store-rooms were used for assignations with waitresses, a full-time cockroach-killer slept under his desk by day and scooted about on kneepads at night, and the senior chef de legumes was an elderly French alcoholic who garnished vegetable dishes by stuffing his mouth with chopped parsley and spitting over them."

    In later parts of the book, inequalities are more likely to emerge between family members, or groups of hotel clients. By and large, though, Sweet's eye for a good story means that genuinely painful encounters are rendered as funny or bizarre stories. As they accumulate, they create an impression of almost infinite variety – while simultaneously favouring rogues and chancers.

    The swindler Sir Curtis Lampson, for example, whose life according to Sweet "was a project of intoxicating oddness" and involved a series of criminal misleadings as well as a sustained passion for factory girls, chambermaids, shop assistants and waitresses. "Close proximity to flannel drawers aroused intense excitement," he admits in his memoirs, "whereas a pair of frilly panties left me unmoved." Or the clients of a "subterranean cocktail trough" called the Pink Sink, which was handily located between the all-night Turkish baths of Jermyn Street, and the all-male bars of Soho, and included among its regular customers one Kim de la Taste Tickell, "doomed to be known by his school nickname, 'Testicle', who carried a respirator box that contained nothing but the Max Factor he used to maintain the tan he had cultivated on duty in north Africa". Or Stella Lonsdale, spy and double agent. Or …

    You get the picture. Sweet's book is full of wonderful and awful creatures, whose individual lives are full of fascination, but who taken together comprise a group portrait that is significant as well as strange. Apart from anything else, it proves that an appetite for inequality is as resilient as an appetite for opulence – which probably explains why the great four hotels not only survived the stringencies of the war, but are still prosperous today while other less grand establishments have vanished.

    • Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.

  • The Indpendent
    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-west-end-front-by-matthew-sweet-6256588.html
    Word count: 660

    The West End Front, By Matthew Sweet

    Marianne Brace
    Friday 4 November 2011 01:00
    0 comments

    On 14 September 1940, 40 demonstrators turned up at the Savoy, demanding tea, bread and butter. They had marched in during an air raid, giving the management the awkward choice of either ejecting them during the bombing or accommodating them to the disapproval of its patrons.

    The bootmakers and dockers seeking shelter protested that those bedding down in the Savoy's basement with its "snore warden" and nurses enjoyed superior protection from the Luftwaffe. The East End working class, meanwhile, had no access to any kind of deep shelter. War was a leveller, but during the raids some stayed more level than others.

    Matthew Sweet's entertainingly informative The West End Front fields a democratic cast: from crowned heads such as King Zog, paying his bills at the Ritz with gold bullion, to communists like nonagenarian Max Levitas, still resident in Stepney. If, as Sweet suggests, most Home Front histories celebrate a plucky pulling together, using the words 'We" or "Our" in their titles, he has chosen to talk about "Them".

    And he's hit on a winner. During the war the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge's, the Dorchester and other less glittering West End hotels got a new lease of life. Their suites became refuges for exiled European royalty. Statesmen and generals discussed policy in their smoking rooms and sometimes - like Lord Halifax sharing a mistress with Mussolini's London representative - indulged in loose pillow talk. MI5 recruited spies while tapping phones and spying on customers and staff. In the lounges, con men such as Sir Curtis Lampson sold fake commissions. Film stars rubbed shoulders with the "Mayfair Playboys", upper-class criminals supporting themselves as jewel thieves and gun-runners.

    It had looked very different when war was declared. Around 20,000 hotel workers lost their jobs and – more shocking – the Ritz's MD swapped top hat and frock coat for bowler and lounge suit. But once the hotels began to trade on the sturdiness of their buildings, things changed. As well as glitz and glamour, the Dorchester's concete roots became a major selling point, as did the Ritz's steel skeleton. The restaurant was now a shelter too, while its Lower Bar offered a thrumming pick-up spot for men who liked a man in uniform. And many did, including the disgraced Tory MP Sir Paul Latham with his artificial leg and taste for gunners.

    So, as their staff exchanged livery for uniforms, the rich exchanged home for hotels where oysters and caviar weren't subject to rationing. One way of defying Hitler was to live it up – "The Ritzkrieg" - by carrying on as they had always done. But it caused resentment.

    Packing in the anecdotes, Sweet dots his pages with colourful walk-ons ("Artful Charlie", "Baba Blackshirt") and tantalising vignettes (Dylan Thomas licking gravy from an MI5 girl's legs). His impressive list of interviewees feature Victor Legg, employed for 50 years at the Ritz, Joe Gilmore, Savoy barman who mixed cocktails for Sinatra and stashed whisky for Churchill, and Crown Prince Alexander, born to exiled parents in Claridge's Suite 212, transformed for the occasion into Yugoslav territory.

    Sweet puts himself in the narrative while warily interviewing self-styled King Leka in Tirana or enjoying lunch with mischievous George Hayim, veteran cruiser. But even he doesn't know what to make of some subjects - particularly Stella Lonsdale. Promiscuous and avaricious, this possible Nazi agent wore out MI5's most hardened interrogator with her lying and shocked one informer with "indescribably filthy" conversation.

    Interned foreign staff, a botched abortion, King Peter of Yugoslavia facing a hopeless future - the book has sobering stories. But there's something cheerfully life-affirming in the way the grand hotels weathered the storm. With the deferent and the defiant, they dazzled and dug in, kept calm and carried on.
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  • Express
    https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/283121/Book-review-The-West-End-Front-The-Wartime-Secrets-Of-London-s-Grand-Hotels
    Word count: 553

    Book review - The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets Of London's Grand Hotels
    MATTHEW SWEET did not invent the phrase “the west end Front”.
    By Christopher Silvester
    PUBLISHED: 00:00, Fri, Nov 11, 2011

    The West End Front The Wartime Secrets Of London s Grand Hotels The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets Of London's Grand Hotels []

    It was used by society magazines to describe the rarefied milieu of the Ritz, the Savoy, the Dorchester and Claridges, etc, during the Second world war.

    Most social histories of the home Front emphasise the notion that the British were all in it together. Sweet’s version dispels the myth somewhat.

    Simply by doing business as usual London’s grand hotels demonstrated “the tenacity of privilege during wartime”.

    those society magazines saw it differently of course. to them, argues Sweet, the war “transformed grill rooms and cocktail bars into theatres of patriotic self-advertisement”.

    In each of his chapters covering such categories as hotel staff, musicians, cabinet ministers, society hostesses, con artists, homosexuals, traitors and foreign royalty Sweet has tracked down and interviewed a surviving witness or their descendant, giving a sparkling freshness to the various episodes he describes.

    The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets Of London's Grand Hotels by Matthew Sweet, Faber & Faber, £20

    In the first years of the war Italian waiters and maitres d’ found themselves interned as enemy aliens alongside Mosleyites and full-throated Fascist sympathisers.

    Inside the internment camps it was the Fascists who brazenly ran the show leading Sweet to describe one at ascot as “a little Fascist paradise surrounded by pine trees”.

    One casualty of the experience was Loreto Santarelli, once the socially assured restaurant manager of the Savoy.

    By the time he was released from internment his spirit had been broken.

    “His profession was dignity,” explains Sweet, “and he had been robbed of his dignity”.

    Another chapter discusses the invasion of the Savoy in September 1940, the eighth night of the Blitz, when a handful of east end communists turned up and demanded access to the hotel’s deep shelter.

    Under the law they could not be turned away but hotel staff defused a potentially difficult situation by serving the invaders tea with bread and butter. Yet this seemingly paltry gesture of protest caused the government to open the Underground to the masses throughout the raids.

    The Dorchester was “a building in which the respectable and the dubious mixed by the thousand, knocking back cocktails and indulging in careless talk”.

    Its shelters contained a ballroom as well as dormitories for wealthy cabinet ministers and other worthies. Curiously, leaders of the British Zionist movement found themselves living alongside upper-class anti-Semites.

    Sweet interviewed Joyce Stone, widow of band leader Lew Stone, who laments the disappearance of the west end she knew. “It’s almost a physical ache in me, I want it back so,” she says. Sweet is an entertaining guide to 20th-century British social history and he prefers the byways to the highways.

    Glamour and seediness jostle for our attention while Sweet combines nostalgic whimsy and gossipy flourishes with impressive sleuthing.

    Verdict: 4/5

  • Financial Times
    https://www.ft.com/content/425f9866-0608-11e1-ad0e-00144feabdc0
    Word count: 310

    Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
    https://www.ft.com/content/425f9866-0608-11e1-ad0e-00144feabdc0

    The West End Front
    Matthew Sweet’s engrossing history of London’s grand hotels during the second world war is eye-opening

    Save to myFT

    Review by Carl Wilkinson November 4, 2011
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    During the Blitz, while East End workers survived on powdered egg and “macon” (mutton-bacon) and were prevented from sheltering in the Underground (until they marched on the Savoy demanding access), society’s upper echelons lived in luxury and safety at the Dorchester, Claridges and the Ritz.

    Matthew Sweet’s engrossing history of London’s grand hotels during the second world war is eye-opening. The rich danced through air raids (the band timing songs to the boom of falling munitions), and slept cheek by jowl with cabinet ministers, aristocrats and captains of industry on camp beds in the bomb-proof basement. Around them, spies, prostitutes and con artists plied their trade.

    The West End Front is meticulously researched but, like a waiter at the Ritz, Sweet effortlessly serves up dish after dish of deliciously intriguing, scandalous and funny tales that give a rather different view of London life during the war.

    The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels, by Matthew Sweet, Faber, RRP£20, 384 pages
    Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
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  • The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/21/operation-chaos-matthew-sweet-review
    Word count: 997

    Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet review – spies, Vietnam deserters and a cult of evil

    A horribly readable account of the US military deserters who found asylum in Sweden during the Vietnam War, and their group’s infiltration by the CIA
    Andrew Brown

    Andrew Brown

    Wed 21 Feb 2018 03.59 EST
    Last modified on Fri 23 Feb 2018 19.10 EST
    A napalm strike near US troops on patrol in South Vietnam, 1966.
    A napalm strike near US troops on patrol in South Vietnam, 1966. Photograph: AP

    It is almost forgotten now what a decisive role Sweden played in the Vietnam war. Even at the time, the armies doing the fighting and the million or so Vietnamese doing the dying may have underestimated the importance Swedish public opinion had on their struggle. But in Sweden it was never in doubt. The starting point for this weird, sad, horribly readable story is the arrival in Stockholm in May 1968 of six misfit and confused US deserters from the Vietnam war after they had been shepherded across the Soviet Union from Japan, where a fishing vessel had smuggled them on to a Russian ship.

    They had been transported across the USSR “on a current of vodka” and with women supplied by the KGB; they had even been questioned by Yuri Andropov, later to rise to supreme power, and helped to make a propaganda film in which one of them, according to Sweet’s account, who had been a ship’s cook and never landed in the country, gave wrenching testimony of all the atrocities he and his unit had committed on the ground in Vietnam.
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    To progressive Swedish opinion at the time they were a demonstration of the country’s stand as a moral beacon for the world. This was only six years after the death of Dag Hammarskiöld, the Swedish secretary general of the UN. The country still thought of itself as the spearpoint of human progress. What the deserters made of it is rather harder to tell.

    They seem to have had as little as possible to do with their Swedish hosts, except for the girlfriends they rapidly acquired. There were already around 80 deserters in Sweden and the kind of high-minded patricians who had originally tried to help them were relegated to the status of useful idiots. Although Matthew Sweet gives a vivid account of the group’s arrival at Arlanda airport, where they gave a press conference after expelling all the US press and wire services, I can find no trace of this in contemporary Swedish newspapers. The story comes from the memoirs of one of the most resourceful of the group (and the only black man), Terry Whitmore, but the archives of the two Stockholm morning papers record instead that the men were driven straight from their plane to a police station, where they were held over the weekend while their papers were processed.
    The Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC.
    The Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. Photograph: Alamy

    On the Monday, Bertil Svahnström, a distinguished former foreign correspondent and pacifist who ran the Swedish Vietnam Committee, had arranged a press conference. But the men never turned up. They had been driven away by the American Deserters Committee, an organisation whose funding, purposes and animating spirits are all shrouded in mystery. Svahnström was left apologising to the media. There is no contemporary record of the press conference that the book describes, either at the airport or anywhere else.

    The difficulties of establishing even such a simple fact as when and where the deserters first spoke to the Swedish press supply only a foretaste of the puzzles that Sweet explores.

    The American Deserters Committee was of course infiltrated by the CIA, as well as by the Swedish security services and presumably the KGB as well. The survivors Sweet has tracked down all believe they know who the spies were, and all disagree. Most of the explanations are plausible. Certainly they are far more plausible than the undisputed reality, which is that the core of the group who went to Stockholm fell into the clutches of an American fantasist and convicted fraudster, who built a cult that endures to this day.
    Lyndon LaRouche.
    Lyndon LaRouche. Photograph: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis/Getty Images

    Cliff Gaddy, a deserter who reinvented himself as an expert on Vladimir Putin at the Brookings Institution, a respected Washington thinktank. But none of them, not even Gaddy, are as unlikely as Lyndon LaRouche, the self-taught Marxist who swept many of the deserters into his cult, and ended up running for president of the US eight times in a row.

    The LaRouche cult was violent and paranoid. In the terminology of Dungeons and Dragons – a game whose worldview is rather more realistic – its alignment was chaotic evil. Sweet describes a cult that taught, and teaches, that the British empire is the greatest force for evil the world has ever known and that the Queen, Henry Kissinger and Olof Palme, the assassinated prime minister of Sweden, are figures of transcendent wickedness. Half a dozen deserters were swept up inside it and many remained there for decades.

    I’m not sure that this was the intended effect, but I finished reading Operation Chaos with a bewildered admiration for the unhappy spooks whose job it was to make sense of the people they spied on.

    • Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves is published by Picador. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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  • The Wall Street Journal
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-chaos-review-support-any-friend-1519689175
    Word count: 1125

    ‘Operation Chaos’ Review: Support Any Friend
    U.S. deserters from the Vietnam War were welcomed in Sweden by a band of radical expatriates riven by fear of CIA infiltration.
    ‘Operation Chaos’ Review: Support Any Friend
    Photo: Courtesy of Vincent Strollo
    By Jeff Baker
    Feb. 26, 2018 6:52 p.m. ET
    11 COMMENTS

    On April 23, 1968, six American servicemen jumped from a Japanese fishing boat onto a Soviet coast-guard vessel in the Sea of Japan. Deserters from the Vietnam War, they had been smuggled out of Japan onto the boat by Japanese antiwar activists. Once in the U.S.S.R., they were aided by the KGB, which took them on a propaganda tour of the Soviet Union that included a visit with Yuri Andropov and starring roles in a TV program in which one of them, a cook who had never been in combat, told outrageous lies about American atrocities.

    Their eventual destination was Sweden, where the future prime minister, Olof Palme, had just marched through the streets of Stockholm arm in arm with the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow. American deserters and draft resisters were welcomed as heroes: About 1,000 passed through Sweden from 1967 to 1973, admittedly a trickle compared with the estimated 60,000 who moved to Canada to avoid the war.

    Some settled in Sweden and remain there today. Others struggled with the winters and returned to the U.S. to face prosecution or court-martial. A few became enmeshed in the internal politics of the American Deserters Committee, “a group of radical exiles who sowed so much discord that many Swedes suspected they were a CIA front,” as Matthew Sweet writes in “Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves.”

    It wasn’t only the Swedes who were suspicious. Two of the six Americans who arrived through Japan and the Soviet Union got into a fistfight before they got to Sweden—one wanted to acquire and burn an American flag, another strongly objected. The backgrounds and education levels of those who chose not to serve in Vietnam were as diverse as those who did. The difference was that the deserters were on the run and much more paranoid.

    “All deserters believed all other deserters were CIA,” Clancy Sigal, a novelist who ran a safe house in London for those who wanted to escape the war, tells Mr. Sweet. “You could take that as a given. What they felt for each other was a curious mixture of brotherhood and mistrust.”

    It’s the mistrust that interests Mr. Sweet, a host on BBC radio and the author of anecdote-driven books about Victorian England and early British cinema. “Operation Chaos,” he confesses, is not the book he set out to write. His “grand historical survey of the act of desertion from the Second World War to the present day” morphed into a narrative that goes deep into the hothouse politics of the American Deserters Committee before taking a sharp turn into the bizarre machinations of Lyndon LaRouche.
    ‘Operation Chaos’ Review: Support Any Friend
    Photo: WSJ
    Operation Chaos

    By Matthew Sweet
    Holt, 365 pages, $30

    A through-line exists but is hard to follow, even with Mr. Sweet explaining each detour. The American Deserters Committee started in 1968 as a political organization that helped newcomers acclimate to life in Sweden. Its leaders, Bill Jones and Michael Vale, were revolutionaries intent on overthrowing capitalism, and they purged those who wouldn’t toe the Maoist line. Mr. Vale, a translator who did not serve in the military, imposed his will through a psychological technique called ego-stripping. “He degrades you,” a deserter tells Mr. Sweet. “Tells you that you’re worth nothing. Unless you do what he says. When all the defenses are down, he imposes.”

    By 1970, the committee was down to its ego-stripped truest believers. Only one of the six men who jumped from boat to boat had anything to do with it after the first few days. Another continued on to North Korea and is rumored to be an army officer there. Another returned to the U.S., informed on everyone in Sweden, rejoined the Navy, deserted again and went back to Sweden, where he attempted to rob a bank using a water pistol and was disarmed by a teenage girl. Still another, the atrocity fabricator, turned himself in and was convicted of desertion.

    A desperate Mr. Vale went looking for allies on the extreme left. He found what he believed were kindred spirits in a rowdy U.S.-based group led by a charismatic firebrand who called himself Lyn Marcus. Mr. Vale decided to join forces, a move he immediately regretted. Too late. Lyn Marcus was in fact LaRouche, described by Mr. Sweet as “a management consultant from New Hampshire who . . . wants you to know that Britain started the Vietnam War, that the Beatles were created as an instrument of psychological warfare, and that he is the only man who can save . . . everyone from the genocidal ambitions of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”

    That description suggests a roguish charm that is nowhere in LaRouche’s writings or his actions. Mr. Vale soon fell out, but some of his followers supported LaRouche through decades of nonsense. Some of them wrote for publications controlled by LaRouche that referred to Palme as “a raging beast, an ax killer, the Devil’s devil.” An assassin shot Palme in the back as he left a Stockholm theater in 1986. Members of a LaRouche-backed political party were questioned; the crime remains unsolved.

    The book’s title is taken from a CIA program that illegally targeted the Black Panther Party and other organizations. There is evidence that the CIA did have operatives in the American Deserters Committee, surveilling its members and subverting its activities. Mr. Sweet identifies a possible informant but doesn’t quite come up with the proof.

    What he does do is tie together a strange story that continues to limp along 50 years after it began. LaRouche, now 95, served five years in prison for fraud and tax evasion. His name appears in the Steele Dossier, which alleges that the Kremlin indirectly paid for his followers to visit Moscow. Mr. Jones remains the editor of a LaRouche magazine and recently asked a question at a White House press briefing. Clifford G. Gaddy, an American Deserters Committee member who wrote for LaRouche publications in Sweden, is a former fellow at the Brookings Institution and the co-author of a book on Vladimir Putin ; the other author, Fiona Hill, is a foreign-policy adviser to President Trump.

    Mr. Baker is a writer in Portland, Ore.

  • Spectrum Culture
    http://spectrumculture.com/2018/02/25/operation-chaos-matthew-sweet-review/
    Word count: 735

    Operation Chaos: by Matthew Sweet
    John Paul John Paul
    February 25, 2018

    Operation Chaos is an exercise in narrative disorder, its story jumping around and taking as many twists and conspiratorial turns as the equally chaotic characters populating its pages.
    3.5 / 5

    Operation Chaos is an exercise in narrative disorder, its story jumping around and taking as many twists and conspiratorial turns as the equally chaotic characters populating its pages. Concerning American G.I.s who deserted during the Vietnam War, it’s a twisted tale that reads almost farcical in the levels of paranoia, personal political posturing and general Sixties-ness of it all. From tales of mass brainwashing to Manchurian candidate-esque soldiers to mass global conspiracies headed by, of all people, the Queen of England, Operation Chaos is as humorously fascinating as it is deeply disturbing. The lengths to which some individuals will go to propagate their off-the-radar theories and personal ideologies is, especially in this current social and political climate, a reminder of just how fucked up some people’s warped senses of reality have become.

    Following the myriad frayed threads of this seemingly impossible story of desertion, spy games and general paranoia of the fringe variety, author Matthew Sweet finds himself ultimately enmeshed in his own story. Given the questionable status of his subjects’ varying levels of sanity, it’s little surprise they would go from complete and total skepticism to full-fledged trust to conspiracy-theory-mad distrust and back again, often within the course of a single conversation. Identifying the dozens of players in a helpful opening preface, Sweet sets the tone for much of what is to follow in his amusingly curt descriptions of the story’s primary players. One is described as “One of many drug users among the deserters,” while another, “Ballet coach. Sharp dresser,” and still another, “Dope-smoking former artilleryman from New York State. Guitar player. Porn performer.”

    This somewhat subversive tone helps underscore much of the ideological absurdity that follows, ranging from the aforementioned theory that the Queen of England controls the entire world to the more disturbing—although ultimately proven to be false—accusations of platoon leaders disemboweling Vietnamese children and tossing their hollowed-out corpses back to the now childless parents. To be sure, the Vietnam War was full of unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides, but fortunately the majority of Sweet’s narrative eschews the jungles of Southeast Asia in favor of the Scandinavian safe harbor that was late-‘60s Sweden and a seemingly irreparably divided America.

    The first country to openly welcome American deserters, Sweden played a prominent role in the lives of those recounted in Operation Chaos. From the arrival of the first four prominent deserters who quickly become something of a Fab Four of political and ideological dissidents and cause célèbre of the intellectual elite in Sweden, to the formation of the American Deserters Committee, Sweden played host to the primary movers and shakers within the world of American desertion. Already seen as a country of questionable morals following multiple pieces documenting Sweden’s loose ideas surrounding sexuality and films such as I Am Curious (Yellow), it proved an ideal home base for the former American soldiers espousing a very particular brand of subsequently anti-American rhetoric.

    It’s ultimately a fascinating story seemingly long forgotten by all but those who found themselves caught in the middle, the courses of their lives forever altered. Operation Chaos offers a new look at the era and the war that forgoes the usual combat and political narratives in favor of something truly strange and bizarre, rife with countless rabbit holes, plot twists and questionable characters and motives. Fortunately, Sweet was willing to throw himself into the middle of the chaos and come back with a confusing, confounding and utterly compelling narrative that spans decades, continents and levels of mental stability.
    Posted In:

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    John Paul
    John Paul

    John Paul is a musician, writer and voracious collector of vinyl. When not filling his home with records, he writes for PopMatters and his own blog (tumblr.com/blog/vinylcompulsion) wherein he tackles his massive collection one album at a time and plays bass in a seemingly endless series of bands in both Michigan and Chicago.

  • The Arts Desk
    https://theartsdesk.com/books/matthew-sweet-operation-chaos-review-paranoia-and-insanity-cold-war
    Word count: 1107

    Matthew Sweet: Operation Chaos review - paranoia and insanity in the Cold War
    The deep, dark, wittily told story of the Vietnam deserters who demonised Her Majesty
    by Jasper ReesSunday, 11 March 2018
    Matthew Sweet: reassuring company among the fruitcakes of 'Operation Chaos'

    In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive history may have missed some nuts out. Not that anyone would question the sanity of a deserter from the US Army in 1968. Seen on the ground and from the air, the hot front of the Cold War was no place to be.

    Thus a group of four daring pioneers shucked their uniforms while on leave in Japan, and made their way via a fishing vessel to the eastern shore of the Soviet landmass, across which they were ceremonially paraded as propaganda trophies until they fetched up in Sweden. The Swedes, those traditionally neutral peaceniks, offered a haven to men who refused to participate in Uncle Sam’s ideological blitzkrieg. Six more followed, and in due course hundreds of others. It became, in Matthew Sweet’s phrase, the Casablanca of the Cold War. So far, so sane.

    The tributary narrative of the Vietnam deserters is told by Sweet in Operation Chaos. The title barely hints at the ensuing miasma of paranoid lunacy which culminated in a cult accusing Queen Elizabeth II of plotting to trigger the Third World War. Even the subtitle – The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves – barely covers it.

    It’s quite easy to get lost in the maze of this 50-year story. Sweet supplies a map upon entry in the shape of lively pen portraits of the dramatis personae. An index at the exit would have been a helpful bonus. But the essential through-line goes more or less as follows, although not necessarily in this linear order. Some deserters in Sweden organised themselves into a hard-left revolutionary cell which naturally pricked the interest of the CIA's Operation Chaos, designed to sniff out foreign infiltration of protest movements. The American Deserters Committee treated enlisted members to a technique of personality-stripping designed to render them slavishly obedient to the cause (and to weed out any suspected agents of the US government: several were randomly subjected to accusation). The ACD split, a bit like a prog rock band riven by musical differences, while Sweden’s goodwill towards the deserters - some of whom were homesick depressives, others plain delinquents - dwindled as the Vietnam war ended.

    Matthew Sweet: Operation ChaosThe story’s rococo second act begins as this point. The spirit of revolutionary fervour, which had already spread into other European nations, then boomeranged back to the US as deserters returned home to slapped wrists and even pardons. There several of them fell under the aegis of Lyndon LaRouche, an epically narcissistic cut-price Kurtz who specialised in brainwashing followers to believe the most fearful ragbag of hallucinatory claptrap. The National Caucus of Labor Committees which he led was a religious cult which happened not to have any dealings with God, a role usurped by LaRouche, who soldiers on at 95 and is perhaps immortal. In the swiftest imaginable sprint up the blindside the NCLC travelled from the hard left to the hard right, around the time of Jimmy Carter’s election, and offered their services to the formerly loathed CIA. Larouche ran for president eight times, while a LaRouchian offshoot set up in Sweden as the European Workers Party, whose members may or may not have been behind the unsolved assassination in 1986 of the prime minister Olof Palme.

    Matthew Sweet is a familiar voice on Radio 3 (his Wiki page needs updating: it says he presents Night Waves, which was supplanted by Free Thinking four years ago). Those who enjoy his wry tone can choose to hear it as they read. It’s a great help, especially as he has reassuringly inserted himself into the narrative as a sane and rational guide down a weird rabbithole into a barking netherworld of adamantine delusions. All over America and in sundry parts of Europe, he chases down the players in this lurid psychodrama, and does normal things like have lunch with them, go on walks with them. Keeping a foot in the real world, he tries kindly but firmly to extract the truth concealed among buried memories and long-cherished fantasies.

    The story is on firmest ground in these encounters, when Sweet is closest to the action. His most regular, if not most reliable confidant is a penumbrous figure called Michael Vale who, a decade older than all the deserters in Sweden, marshalled and frankly bullied them into compliance. Then LaRouche came along and, much as Stalin did to Trotsky, chewed up this rival and spat him out, condemning him to an eternity of globe-wandering exile.

    Sweet keeps a weather eye on his own sanity as he spends years seeking answers in a vortex. In the reader the company of conspiracy theorists induces some weariness and claustrophobia, and blurred vision. There are a lot of acronyms clotting the copy. A couple of chapters on, the details of something known as Jerum Affair rapidly deliquesce. Alert to this danger, Sweet peppers the canvas with gossipy cameos for writers, intellectuals and film stars: your Fondas and Redgraves, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Stieg Larson pops up. Bertrand Russell features as the NCLC's British enemy number two (the top spot is reserved for Her Majesty, obviously).

    After detours into Swedish porn, a fictional farm and other bizarre narrative outposts, the story fetches up in the urgent geopolitical here and now. President Trump’s adviser on Russia is Fiona Hill, who has a degree from St Andrews (but is not the Scottish Fiona Hill sacked last year by Theresa May). She landed the gig as a result of her definitive book on Putin. Her Wiki page doesn’t say so, but she wrote this volume with Cliff Gaddy, a co-worker at the Washington-based thinktank the Brookings Institute. In another life Gaddy was a US army deserter and energetic brainwasher who became a kingpin of the European Workers Party in Sweden. Once a prime suspect for the murder of Olof Palme, his transformation into a respectable citizen is just one more baffling metamorphosis in a hypnotic history composed in a long and winding hall of mirrors. Enter at your peril.

    Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet (Picador, £20)
    More book reviews on theartsdesk

  • The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/african-dominion-operation-chaos-the-parking-lot-attendant-and-hotel-silence
    Word count: 124

    Operation Chaos, by Matthew Sweet (Holt). A little-known chapter of the Vietnam War unfolded in 1968 in neutral Sweden, after six American deserters arrived there, having been smuggled via the Soviet Union. “It may take guts to go, but it takes balls to say no” was their controversial dictum. In this meld of history and reportage, the deserters’ stories, and those of dozens of revolutionaries, hosts, and spies, coalesce into an often moving examination of loyalty and dissent. Sweet details an undercover C.I.A. mission to disrupt defection, and sheds light on the exiles’ complex motives. His quest to track down all the major players in the story takes him, variously, to a maximum-security prison, a cannabis refinery, and Paris cafés.

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