Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 173

Daughters And Sons Of The Soil, Awake!

With property prices falling and import prices up, perhaps it’s time for careers in food once more.This week I visited three farmers’ markets in central London (Chapel Street, Marylebone and King’s Cross) and bought most of what we needed for the week, although it’s still hard to find fresh fish in a country entirely surrounded […]

What About The Words?

Yesterday I went to the ‘Shakespeare In Ten Acts’ Exhibition at the British Library. I’d never seen a real first folio or any examples of Shakey’s handwriting before. It’s a thoughtful and well-focussed show that doesn’t attempt the impossible by covering too much. Instead it concentrates on ten specific subjects. The last, the Wooster Group’s […]

Invisible Ink: T Lobsang Rampa

W H Auden was wrong; there are some books which are best forgotten. By the time the memoir of a Tibetan monk entitled ‘The Third Eye’ turned up on the desk of Secker & Warburg, it had been turned down by most leading houses. S&W took a punt and published it in 1956, and the […]

Film Review: The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Rein may just be winding us up. ‘The Neon Demon’ feels like a companion piece to ‘Black Swan’ – neurotic women, gorgeous visuals, surreal bloody mayhem – but is it any good? Well, two-thirds of it is terrific, and even the last third is just about forgivable. The story is as old as […]

‘I wish to protest most strongly about everything’

So ran a letter in the Telegraph once. But London does love a good protest. Every weekend there’s a march, and there always has been as far back as I can remember. From Aldermaston to the Poll Tax, we’ve taken to the streets whenever we feeling strongly about something, and this week it happened three […]

Livin’ La Vida Folle

Language – so long as you get the gist of it, that’s OK. And now that Farridge, Johnson & Gove have joined Lord Haw-Haw, Vidkun Quisling and Abu Hamza in the list of most hated males, I’m walking around London realising that almost everyone who touches my life is from somewhere else. My barber is […]

What Makes British Parks So Different?

British parks aren’t like ones in most other countries. They’re for reflection and thinking, not action and recreation. It’s a measure of Holland Park’s affluence that while other neighbourhood parks have bandstands, Holland Park has an opera company. The neighbourhood’s elegant centrepiece has landscaped gardens with statues and peacocks, an orangery and an ice house. […]

Peculiar Crimes 1

A new semi-regular feature that reports the really odd stories you may have missed, but which may inspire ideas for fictional stories… In 1986, charity organisation United Way of Cleveland arranged a spectacular stunt for fundraising publicity: an attempt to set a new world record for simultaneously released balloons.On Public Square, a structure as large […]

Raymond Kirkpatrick Takes A Summer Holiday

Raymond Kirkpatrick is a colleague of Arthur Bryant’s. The bear-like heavy metal-loving Professor of English is currently working at the British Library and is our occasional guest speaker. His opinions areextremely his own. Day One. I thought as there’s usually not much going on around now I’d take a week off and head for Southern […]

UK Politics – The Box-Set

First it was like ‘House of Cards’, Machiavellian and duplicitous. Then it was like ‘Game of Thrones’, gory and epic. Soon it could become more like ‘The Walking Dead’. This has been the most extraordinary week in British politics since 1945, but if we run the comparisons to box sets we’ll become more paranoid than […]