Mary Malloy's Blog on Books

Alas, our favorite museums are closed for the near future, but we can still visit them in the movies. Even though museums are mostly places for the contemplation of motionless objects and works of art, they are visually compelling and filled with things to spark our imaginations. Until we can go back into the galleries I am going to suggest some movies to take their place. I taught a course on the History of Museums for ten years at the Harvard Extension School and during that time developed a “Film-clip Festival” to amuse students at the end of each term, and to explore pop-culture images of museums. Are museums in movies all that different from the institutions we love in the real world, I wondered? Indeed they are! About half of the museums depicted on film have a monster on the loose, and a significant number of others are being robbed! In 125 movies made between 1911 and 2019 that include a scene set in a real or fictional museum, eight themes can be identified that ...

I have been working for several years on compiling a list of movies that have scenes set in museums, and it occurs to me that some of you might be looking for film suggestions while museums are closed and you are isolating at home. My current list has 125 films on it, from which I have selected fourteen, plus a cartoon extra, a documentary, two music videos, and some TV shows. This list does not include some of the most familiar titles like  The DaVinci Code  (2006) or the  Night at the Museum  series (2006, 2009 and 2014), and you will be relieved to know that it also doesn’t include a new sub-genre I have discovered: “teen-gore-slasher movies set in museums.” Jen Kramer, my friend and colleague from Harvard, is working with me to put the background info, plus some clips, stills, and the full list into a website. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks to all of you who have already alerted me to films. Wash your hands before digging into the popcorn! Movie...

The Quiet Land The title of this book was inspired by a poem that I quote at the end of the novel. In a quiet water’d land, a land of roses, Stands Saint Ciarán’s city fair; And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations Slumber there. Written in the fourteenth century, about a hundred years after the novel is set, it captures a sense of the peace that you feel today at Clonmacnoise: “A quiet water’d land, a land of roses.” But beneath that quiet, literally beneath your feet, lie the bones of the great and ferocious warriors of Irish history and legend: “Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses / Now their final hosting keep.” It struck me that this had actually been a most UNquiet Land.   The original poem was written in Irish by Angus O’Gillan (also called Aongus Ó Giolláin, Enoch O’Gillain, and Enoch o’Gillan), but it is best known from a brilliant late-19 th century translation by T.W. (Thomas William Hazen) Rolleston (1857-1920...

The heroine of my first three novels, Lizzie Ma nning, is named after my great-grandmother, Elizabeth O’Neil Manning, who died one hundred years ago in Homestead, Pennsylvania. She was 53 years old and a victim of the influenza pandemic that spread catastrophically around the globe between 1918 and 1920. Elizabeth, two of her five daughters, and a newborn granddaughter, all died within one week starting on 27 January 1920. My grandmother, Marie Manning Newman, was then living in Detroit; she was pregnant and gave birth to my aunt Gladys on the 10th of February. She learned of the deaths of her mother, sisters, and niece in an extraordinary 14-page letter, written by her sister Agnes. Then 23 years old and still living at home, Agnes was the primary caregiver of her mother and sister Anna through their short but deadly illnesses. Their older sister Elizabeth (called “Sis”) was married and lived in an apartment nearby with her husband and toddler son. She was the first one to get ...