This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1919–33) and its sequel Secrets of Life (1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces the Secrets using an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines the Secrets series through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues that Secrets developed a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by the Secrets films.

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This article examines a notebook owned by the poet and topographical writer Norman Nicholson, which is held in his collection at the John Rylands Library. The notebook, entitled Topographical Notes: Morecambe Bay etc., includes detailed notes and sketches taken at numerous locations in Cumbria, many of which recur in Nicholson’s poetry and topographical texts. The article analyses Nicholson’s note-taking practices, with particular attention to sensory experience and how this was expressed by the writer. The notebook is especially valuable because no other book of its kind survives in Nicholson’s archive, and because it can be dated towards the end of a long interlude in his career as a poet. The notes can be understood as lying in the space between Nicholson’s poetry and his topographical writing: although ostensibly collecting information for Greater Lakeland (1969), Nicholson’s treatment of light and vision suggests that he was beginning to experiment with some of the themes that characterise his later poetry. The article reflects on what these notes can tell us about Nicholson’s note-taking ‘in the field’, and suggests that his habit of treating the landscape as a repository of history is akin to what Kitty Hauser has called the ‘archaeological imagination’.

The term ‘cultural history of science’, as others have observed, is clumsy and imperfect. Cultural history is itself riddled with ambiguities which the addition of ‘science’ is unlikely to clarify. However, the term loosely describes a genre of historical writing which has become a staple of cross-disciplinary research: books which examine science's wider cultural ‘impacts’ and ‘contexts’. The heterogeneity of this field is so great, however, that an examination of methodology is called for.