Film The Eagle of the Ninth original author Rosemary Sutcliff, historical novelist and children’s writer, loved a good Western movie. Kevin Macdonald, director of the new The Eagle of the Ninth film, draws on Westerns. Channel 4 newsreader and reporter Samira Ahmed writes an intriguing story of her own journey with Westerns, from age 8, at the Touching from a Distance website on popular culture.   It’s not directly connected with Rosemary Sutcliff but it is a good read! She starts:

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born’ the Wild West was still – just about – in living memory. And a little British Asian girl growing up in 70s suburbia could read the opening lines to Laura Ingalls Wilders’s ‘Little House on the Prairie’, or turn on the TV and enter the frontier lands of the movie Western. One day the little girl grew up to be a journalist, and a campaigner on feminist issues, and still loved Westerns so much that she sat through ‘Heaven’s Gate’ dubbed in German just for the chance to see it on a massive East Berlin cinema screen. This is the story of my journey.