Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 183

How London’s Architecture Found A Future

After WWII, London took a strange turn. Sick of the past, of rubble and dirt and old, it launched an offensive on the future. Unlike other cities such that had sustained massive bomb damage, such as Gdansk, which restored itself down to the last brick, London opted for as-yet untried modernism. The NHS began, modern […]

Invisible Ink 2: Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham I thought carefully about including Margery Allingham in my list of forgotten authors, so let’s address the problem right at the start. She’s hardly ever out of print, and many readers know her name even if they haven’t read her. However, very few of them have really got to grips with her […]

Bring It Back: Souvenirs We Love

The origin of the word ‘souvenir’ is late 18th century,French, from souvenir ‘remember’, from Latin subvenire ‘occur to the mind’, but it has come to mean a keyring made in China. If you have the misfortune to walk around Leicester Square, once a perfectly pleasant and fairly unremarkable set of roads featuring cinemas and theatres, […]

Is This The Least Discovered Square In Europe?

Our Easter tour of Romania and Transylvania held many surprises – one of the best was Viscri, a 12th century church and fortress still run by a tiny old lady who’ll tear your ticket and share stories. Reaching this out-of-the-way spot along an avenue of mistletoe-covered trees and finding such an untouched and barely […]

Staking Out Castle Dracula

Transylvania’s Castle Bran is only the fictional home of Count Dracula, but Bram Stoker used it as a direct model for his novel, which grants it an awkward place in Romania’s history. The government would rather remember Queen Marie than a British pulp author, but the image stuck in the public consciousness, and therefore it’s […]

Back To The Salt Mine…

We’ve just concluded our epic tour of Romania and Transylvania (mostly without wi-fi), and for me this country came out very high in the list of central/East & Baltic places I’ve been visiting in the last few years. It felt a little like touring India; there were so few of us visiting from the UK […]

Off For Easter, Fang You Very Much

Bram Stoker never visited Romania. He depicted Dracula’s castle based on a description of Bran Castle that was available to him at the time of writing, so now I’m going to put that right. I’ll be writing a novella for the Mysterious Bookshop in NYC, and am off to do my research. My Easter journey […]

On Terrorism

I live in one of the West’s epicentres for terrorist attacks, at the confluence of three major railway stations, and along with my family and friends, we have had to live with bombing campaigns all of our adult lives. On the 7th of September 2005four Islamist extremistsseparately detonated three bombs in quick succession aboard undergroundtrains […]

Six Reasons Why You Should Read Dickens

As I start packing up my books in preparation to moving house (just for six months) I try once more to reduce my library to the bare essentials. There’s no point in keeping dead books, ones you have enjoyed but to which you will never return, and so mine is a living library. I […]

Invisible Ink Will Live On Here

Never one to leave a good idea alone, now that the column and its paper have gone I’ll be posting an Invisible Ink column each week here. There will be a collection of the columns, much expanded (I’ve written it, we just have to sell it) but in the meantime you can get your fix […]