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Peter Cushing and a host of other much-loved British talent star in this Cold War thriller from 1960, here playing researchers who unexpectedly find themselves ‘silenced’ by government officials who conclude that a newly discovered cure for both typhus and the bubonic plague could be used for biological warfare by enemy states.
At London’s Haughton Research Laboratory a hard working team of scientists, led by Professor Sewell (the always dependable Peter Cushing), come very close to developing a certain strain of ‘superbugs’ that could nip world plagues in the bud so to speak (perhaps, we could do with them now). Low and behold they come up trumps but when the good professor is anxious to publish the results he is called to the office of Minister of Defence Sir George Gatting (Raymond Huntley). This outwardly respectable but in truth far from lovable authority figure informs Sewell just how dangerous it would be to publish his scientific breakthrough discover
February 8, 2021
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the example of Ciaran Carson, the Irish poet born in 1948, who wrote (like the rest of his generation from the North) in the immediate shadows of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, and who died in October 2019.
I got to know Ciaran just a bit in 2013 when I was on a Fulbright to the Seamus Heaney Centre, which Ciaran had come to direct after many years as a freelance journalist, prose writer, translator, and poet. He was wry and dry-humored and always impeccably dressed. (Word is he had an attic absolutely packed with three-piece suits.) He also played flute and tin-whistle at Madden’s Bar on Tuesday nights with his wife Deirdre and whoever else showed up for the evening’s “trad session” a casual, improvised collective playing (“performance” isn’t quite the right word) mostly turned inward toward the space the musicians were gathered around, rather than outward toward the bar’s patrons. I once asked him how