History, Medieval, Retrospective
Stuart Gorman
The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Movies

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La Belle Film Noir

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La Belle Film Noir

I’m not sure exactly when I first became obsessed with Film Noir. It may have been when I took an Introduction to Film Studies course in second year of university, but I had seen several noir classics even before then. My family watched quite a lot of black and white movies when I was growing up. These were more often traditional westerns rather than noirs, a product of several months spent in Arizona where we checked out basically every western the local university library had, but by age 18 I had seen at least Key Largo and The Big Sleep and probably a few others.

Despite being a big fan of noir as a genre, I had only seen the genre’s most famous members. I had tried to dive deeper over the years, but it was surprisingly hard to find noirs to watch – they are not readily available on most streaming platforms and DVD collections usually just have the same famous ones every time. Two factors came together last year to change that: the first was the discovery that there are a lot of old noir films on the Internet Archive and the second was my partner becoming very interested in noir as well. Together, we watched 117 noirs between September and the end of 2025, and we’re not planning on stopping in 2026. The end of the year makes a great time to reflect on noir and how my relationship with it has changed as I’ve watched way, way more films, so I decided to write a little something about it.