Categories A Spy Among Friends Print Media

A Spy Among Friends Episode Guide

Episode Titles and Descriptions

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | November 28, 2022

A Spy Among Friends will be available on ITVX on December 8 and BritBox AU on December 9. For those of us across the pond, the US release will be March 12, 2023 on MGM+ (formally Epix). Here are the episode titles and descriptions.

Episode 1: Boom-ooh-yatatatah
Description: In the wake of Kim Philby’s escape to Moscow, his closest friend in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6.), Nicholas Elliott, is under investigation by Mrs. Lily Thomas from the Security Service (MI5): Did he facilitate Philby’s escape because he’s also a traitor working for the Russians, or is it just that his judgement was clouded at a critical moment by their twenty-three year friendship? Or maybe, just maybe, he in fact had the last laugh having manipulated Philby to run to the bosom of the KGB for foreign intelligence purposes.

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Categories Events Gallery Lift Me Up I Am Dying Screenings

Virtual Film Screening: Lift Me Up I Am Dying

Anniversary of John Keats’s Death

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 8, 2022

Following the success of the virtual film screening of Pelé Cox’s Lift Me Up I Am Dying in 2021, British School at Rome (BSR) is pleased to be hosting another screening of the film this year. The film will go live on BSR’s YouTube channel here at 9pm CET/8pm GMT on Wednesday, February 23, on the anniversary of John Keats’s death. This event will be in English and features Damian Lewis, Desiree Ballantyne, Simon Mayonda, Christian Roe and Nicholas Rowe.

Lift Me Up I Am Dying by Pelé Cox recounts John Keats’s lingering death from tuberculosis in Rome from November 1820–⁠February 1821. Pelé assembled the text entirely from the poems, letters, and diaries of the historical protagonists, into what she terms a “poetic chronologue.” Lift Me Up I Am Dying is a story of extraordinary bravery and extraordinary compassion, not only in the face of death but also Keats’ detractors.

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Categories Gallery Lift Me Up I Am Dying Video

VIDEO: Watch Lift Me Up I Am Dying While It’s Available – Feb 23, 2021

Video: Lift Me Up I Am Dying

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 23, 2021

To view photostills, please visit our Gallery here
Read more information about this virtual event here

For more information, please visit the British School at Rome here

Categories Lift Me Up I Am Dying

Virtual Event: Lift Me Up I Am Dying – Feb 20, 2021

Virtual Film Screening: Lift Me Up I Am Dying

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 20, 2021

The British School at Rome (BSR), in association with the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the British Institute of Florence, will host a virtual film screening of Lift Me Up I Am Dying on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 at 22:30 p.m. CET/21:30 p.m. GMT (4:30 p.m. Eastern time, 3:30 Central time). This event will premiere via the BSR’s YouTube channel here on the date and time indicated above. To view photostills, please visit our Gallery here.

Lift Me Up I Am Dying by Pelé Cox recounts John Keats’s lingering death from tuberculosis in Rome from November 1820–⁠February 1821. Pelé assembled the text entirely from the poems, letters, and diaries of the historical protagonists, into what she terms a “poetic chronologue,” timed to conclude at the very moment Keats died two hundred years ago (11 pm, February 23, 1821). Lift Me Up I Am Dying is a story of extraordinary bravery and extraordinary compassion, not only in the face of death but also Keats’ detractors.

Keats was accompanied to Rome, from London, via Naples, by the painter Joseph Severn. They arrived with the hope that Keats might return to England, and his great love Fanny Brawne, after a successful convalescence. But he was dead within four months. All the while Severn attended to him with a compassion so enduring that half a century later he would still ask to be buried by Keats’s side, in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a fervent admirer, not only corresponded with Keats throughout his illness but at his passing penned Adonais, one of the greatest elegies written by one poet of another. Shelley himself was dead a year later and his ashes are interred in the same cemetery.

Lift Me Up I Am Dying was first performed in the Keats-Shelley House, Rome, in 2014. Our challenge has been to stage a performance on the anniversary of Keats’ passing, but in the present moment and from the confines of our own pandemic. The passionate, talented, and resourceful cast of Lift Me Up I Am Dying filmed themselves in their homes on iPhones and their performances were then edited and integrated in Pelé’s home in Ludlow.

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