David Thompson

In the first fully illustrated work of his illustrious career, David Thomson re-examines a series of moments which readers will experience in beautifully reproduced imagery from seventy-two carefully selected films across a hundred-year time span. Hailed by John Banville as the greatest living writer on the movies, David Thomson takes readers on an unprecedented visual journey. His moments range from a set of Eadward Muybridge's pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard and The Red Shoes to the unexpected The Piano Teacher, Burn After Reading immersing the reader via a groundbreaking marriage of imagery and the author's accompanying narrative. David Thomson's evocative, unflinching prose and profound understanding of what makes film and art form identify him as one of the great film writers of our time, making it likely that Moments that Made the Movies will be widely viewed as an important classic on the subject of international cinema.

The British Museum watch collection is unsurpassed anywhere in the world, and tells the story of the watch which spans an incredible 500 years. Within the collection are examples ranging from sixteenth-century early stack freed watches made in south Germany to exquisite decorative watches of the seventeenth century. Everyday watches from the eighteenth century and precision-made chronometers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are included, as are examples from the modern era. All the major makers of Europe and America will be represented, including Thomas Tompion, whose reputation stretched far and wide even in his own time, and the Swiss-born Abraham Louis Breguet, who lived and worked in Paris supplying the best that money could buy to the crown heads and aristocratic families of the western world. In contrast to the high precision of the horological giants, the Museum has a growing collection of wristwatches, including those with automatic winding systems. There are also extensive collections of pin-pallet lever watches made for the mass market during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by companies such as Waterbury and Ingersoll. The collections are brought up to the minute with the inclusion of early examples of electro-mechanical watches and the quartz revolution.