Paul Moody

Robin Turner

Inspired by George Orwell, Paul Moody and Robin Turner take a nostalgic road trip around Britain in search of the perfect pub. 'A deeply satisfying travelogue' Stuart Maconie In 1946, George Orwell, a man fond of a pint, wrote about his favourite pub, The Moon Under Water, in his EVENING STANDARD column. But it didn't actually exist. It was Orwell's vision of a perfect pub. Today, Wetherspoons have fourteen Moon Under Waters, and the nation is awash with identikit, high-street lounge bars competing for a dwindling clientele. Paul Moody and Robin Turner's road trip around Britain, therefore, is not just a search for the perfect pub. It is a deeper investigation into what has happened to British pub culture, once the toast of the world. In fact, it is a search for a kind of life-force kindled by the British public, something the powers-that-be are forever trying to extinguish. Along the way, such luminaries as Pete Brown ('the King of Beer'), Tim Martin (Wetherspoon's boss), Iain Sinclair, James Dean Bradfield and Paul Kingsnorth are consulted - along with a host of micro-brewers, landlords, politicians, bloggers and barroom philosophers. What emerges is a picture of the country as seen through a pint glass, a vision that goes to the heart of what it means to be British.

Looking For the Moon Under Water

The Search for the Perfect Pub

This book is the first of its kind to trace the development of one of the largest and most important companies in British cinema history, EMI Films. From 1969 to its eventual demise in 1986, EMI would produce many of the key works of seventies and eighties British cinema, ranging from popular family dramas like The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970) through to critically acclaimed arthouse successes like Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson, 1982). However, EMI’s role in these productions has been recorded only marginally, as footnotes in general histories of British cinema. The reasons for this critical neglect raise important questions about the processes involved in the creation of cultural canons and the definition of national culture. This book argues that EMI’s amorphous nature as a transnational film company has led to its omission from this history and makes it an ideal subject to explore the ‘limits’ of British cinema.

Paul Moody

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