Goblet of Fire teaser trailer

The first teaser trailer has debuted on Apple.com, and you can see it here, in QuickTime format. It's very teensy-tiny, but it does look exciting, with a similar dark feeling to the previous film (both in its colour palette and its content).

Sadly no Snape - in fact I don't think I have even seen any stills of Snape from the new film yet. But then he's by no means the only character we haven't seen in a GoF context yet - other important ones including McGonagall, Hagrid, Barty Crouch Jr. and Mad-Eye Moody, to the best of my knowledge. So hopefully it doesn't mean he doesn't have much of a role, because he is pretty important to the plot.

The real Arthur Dent

I'm having one of those moments where half of me feels suddenly enlightened, but the other half is more struck by how utterly ignorant I've been for years.

A set of guest lectures are coming up this week in Belfast at the School of History. They're called the Wiles Lectures, and this year they are being given by a man named Christopher Haigh, from one of my several almae matres: Christ Church, Oxford.

Dr. Haigh will be discussing a text from 1601 entitled The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, over a series of four lectures. Its author? One Arthur Dent, a preacher from Essex.

Now I'm not saying that knowing about this text suddenly reveals vast depths of meaning in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy of which I was previously unaware. It takes the form of a fictional debate between four stereotyped characters about how to live a properly 'Christian' life (outline details here), and doesn't therefore seem to stand up very closely to any search for parallels with the plot of Hitch-Hiker's.

But, on a simpler level, if Arthur Dent in H²G² isn't a Plain Man who's taken up to see the Heavens, I'd like to know what he is. And since Douglas Adams studied English at Cambridge, I'm guessing he came across this author and his work at some point, and considered his name suitable for his lost and bemused traveller in space. Either that, or it's a very pleasing coincidence.