Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 166

Films With Moral Dilemmas

It’s a given these days that any film involving corporations, institutions or governments will present a black-and-white picture of good (independent, liberal, quirky, new age) against evil (fascist, secretive, dishonest, betraying) but once in a while we see ethical dilemmas explored in greater detail. Terrence Rattigan’s ‘The Winslow Boy’ has been filmed at least ten […]

Autumn Schedule: London Insights

As summer ends I’ll shortly be heading home and spending some time with something I need to catch up on: London. There are a few experiences in the city that I haven’t tried for a while, so I’ll be visiting institutions, tourist attractions and secret places to see what London in the Phoney War […]

The (Un)Fashionable Author

I’ve always been a bit of a clothes-horse; at a time when most authors were exploring the world of corduroy I was wearing Dirk Bikkenberg. It helps that I’m a boring off-the-peg size and usually find the fit I want. It becomes particularly hard for older men to find anything that doesn’t make them look […]

English As Sheer Spoke

Tip of the hat to the BBC’s Matthew Anderson for finding this tip on the unspoken rules of English grammar. All contrary examples accepted!

Are Bryant & May Becoming Fashionable?

An article in today’s Observer by Sarah Hughes staggered me a bit this morning. Newspapers love to look for two snowstorms and suggest the next big thing will be the Ice Age, but the idea that ‘cosies’ are the hot new thing (nice coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s first book) is a […]

Inventing Creepy-Crawlies

When I was a little boy, living near Greenwich Park in a suburban London street, we were surrounded by creepy-crawlies, the best being the prehistoric but weirdly adorable stag beetle. You could tie cotton to its legs and make it drag things. Then came daddy-long-legs (legses?), and you could pull all its legs off to […]

Being Funny In English

Hogarth’s ‘The Weighing House’ shows the stages from seriousness to hilarity, and is, in itself, a very funny print.Humour travels. Wit does not. Broadly speaking, its said that the UK and France tend to prefer wit while America prefers humour, so it’s harder to cross to the US with European writing than go the […]

‘I Didn’t Come Here To Read’

Sociologist/writerDominic Sandbrook makes a good point in his history of the UK in the 1960s, ‘White Heat’; while it seemed everyone was obsessed by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the truth was very different. The most popular album of the decade was ‘The Sound of Music’. In the same way, while critics get excited […]

Why I’ve Come Off Facebook

Today I finally came off a horrible addictive drug – Facebook. In the past week four of my friends pulled their accounts, and I’ve now joined them. I’m free. Ten years ago Facebook was cutting-edge technology. But the experience felt increasingly clunky compared to modern sites, and the cross-tangle of live chat and posts is […]

Lost – The Misleading Cases

Alan Patrick Herbert once highlighted the complexity of the British licensing laws by accusing the House of Commons of selling liquor without a licence. He also wrote the lyrics to popular songs and shows, including the hugely successful ‘Bless The Bride’, with its earworm song ‘Ma Belle Marguerite’ now rattling around in my head as […]