Recent and forthcoming publications  The Art of Film: John Box   and Production Design       John Box seen here planning to build Aqaba   from scratch - and in Spain rather than   Jordan - with his art director Terry Marsh, for   the famous charge in Lawrence of Arabia.   John won four Oscars and four BAFTAs for   his spectacular yet often unobtrusive   production design during a career that   stretched from the end of the British studio    system in the late1940s to the early days of   CGI on the mid 90s.     My book, based on interviews with John and   surveying his full career, was published by   Wallflower, with a grant from the David Lean   Foundation, in July 2009.     Another essay on production design appeared   in Conjuring the Real: the Role of Architecture   in 18th and 19th century fiction, edited by   Rumiko Handa and James Potter (University   of Nebraska Press, 2011)     A new essay on production design,   'Crafting Worlds: the Changing Role of   the Production Designer', will appear in a   collection of essays entitled Framing Film,   from Intellect in 2012.                           *                *                *    Also due to appear during 2012 are:    -  A chapter on Russian documentary for the  BFI Companion to Documentary, edited by  Brian Winston.    -  A chapter in the Companion to Jean Renoir,  edited by Ginette Vincendeau and Alastair  Philips (Blackwell), on Renoir's reputation.    -  An essay on early film accompaniment  practices in London, in a collection Sounds of  Early Cinema in Britain, edited by Julie Brown  and Annette Davison.    - An essay on the role of ancient-world epics  in developing cinema's new centrality in  early 20th century entertainment, for a collect-  ion edited by Maria Wyke and Pantelis  Michelakis on The Ancient World in Silent  Cinema    - My cointribution to the proceedings of the 2010   Domitor Conference in Toronto, on 'Film as  defined in British Law before 1910'.

Researching R W Paul   Twelve years  ago, after writing and co-producing a television series on early cinema and what led up to it - The Last Machine (BBC2, 1994) - I began to research the enigmatic figure of Robert Paul (1866-1943), who produced Britain's first commercial 'animated photo-graphs' in 1895 (in a controversial partnership with Birt Acres). Paul went on to help launch the British film industry before closing his studio in 1909, to concentrate on scientific instrument making. My work on Paul has continued intermittently, with discoveries about his private life, viewing a remarkable original print of one of his films of Queen Victoria's 1897 Jubilee (top left) in the BFI National Archive, and curating a BFI DVD of Paul's extant films in 2006. In November 2010, a visit to Stockholm allowed me to investigate Paul's visit in 1897. He was there at the invitation of the King, to install and demonstrate a film projector. He also shot a series of films of typical Swedish scenes, which are all lost but known from his sales catalogues.  What I discovered from the newspapers was that a programme of his films ran for three months in Stockholm at the Salon International, which means he must have trained an operator and left copies. Could they still exist somewhere?  Spurred on by this and other discoveries, I now hope to finish the long-promised book on Paul and the early moving picture business during 2012.