Dilys Powell (1901-1995) served as film critic for The Sunday Times from 1939 to 1976, as well as reviewing for Punch; she was one of a tranche of female film critics to flourish around the post-war British film industry (see Bell, 2011). In typically frank style – and speaking to how little film was valued in the interwar period – she observed of her journalistic break at The Sunday Times that she got the job “simply because I was there … I succeeded somebody who really didn’t know the difference between a film and a sponge” (cited in Bell, 2011). The Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film is awarded annually by the London Film Critics Circle, with the most recent winners being Sally Potter and Sandy Powell.

The critic visited Greece annually throughout her life and, alongside film, it was a subject to which she returned in her writing. As the inscription to Mary Stewart suggests, Greece was a shared passion for both authors, with the doyenne of romantic suspense and historical fantasy setting a number of her novels there, including her next offering, My Brother Michael (1959) and, more famously, The Moon-Spinners (1962).

Melanie Bell (2011) ‘Film Criticism as ‘Women’s Work’: the Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945-1965’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 31:2, pp. 191-209.