Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 223

You Can Be Different – Just Not Too Different

I’ve always returned to London because it was just so damned different to everywhere else, but when I walked into Leicester Square yesterday and saw that the entire centre garden had been swallowed up by something called ‘the Disney Cinderella Experience’ my heart sank. First, it’s that word ‘experience’, tacked onto everything. Then there’s the […]

Movie Moments 3: The Artist

It’s been too long since we had a film clip. If this isn’t the most uplifting way to end a film since Edward Woodward got deep-fried in the Wicker Man, I don’t know what is. After a movie filled with the pains and pitfalls of rising and falling fame, the couple find their mojo…take […]

Books Are Like Trees: They Should Be Everywhere

I don’t seem to have a naturally addictive nature, except when it comes to books. They appear around me, fall off me, stick to me, and I leave trails of them wherever I go. I only buy jackets that can accommodate a book. I like pubs that have bookshelves and cafes with books in them, […]

Send In The Gowns

My mum stopped going to Marks & Spencer. ‘Their blouses have dropped off,’ she complained. ‘There was a time when strong corsetry and a good gusset was all you needed under a pleated skirt.’ She loved Blustons Gowns though. ‘It’s so refreshing to find a trapeze dress with some give in the armpits.’ Blustons is […]

‘I Shoot People & Solve Problems’

The first time I saw Martin Butterworth at work, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of an office above Leicester Square tube station arranging a book layout for Dorling Kindersley. This was well over 35 years ago. Martin went to New York as a magazine art director, then was lured to London to work […]

A Walk Through Budapest

It’s time to celebrate Hungary’s freedom at the moment; the streets may be awash with national flags and displays of folk-dancing, but twenty four years isn’t a very long time, and memories of the Communist occupation (replacing the Nazi occupation) are understandably long and vivid. It doesn’t help that you can still see plenty […]

We Are All Children Now

There’s a new book out called ‘Twee’ by Mark Spitz. It’s described as a study of the firstcultural movement since Hip Hop, an old-fashioned and yet highly modern aesthetic that’s embraced internationally by teens, twenty and thirty-somethings and even Baby Boomers, creating a hybrid generation known as Twee. Spitz reckons that Vampire Weekend, Garden State, […]

What Londoners Actually Say

I was reading a crime thriller set in London written by a Californian, and it was peppered with the kind of words you only ever find online when searching ‘British rhyming slang’. Never had I heard one of these words spoken aloud in my own city. It set me thinking. Forget rhyming slang (although you […]

How I Ended Up Producing 23 Books In One Year

…four of which are BRAND SPANKING NEW! Your friendly neighbourhood author is about to attempt the impossible, and I don’t mean watching an entire episode of ‘Gogglebox’. I’ve been writing up a storm for your delectation, partlybecause I love challenges and also because I feel that right now I’m […]

Starry Eyes

I’ve been waiting for a New Millennial Hollywood horror film now since, well, the turn of the century. There have been a few green shoots in films like the wonderfully bonkers ‘The Nines’ and the hideously claustrophobic ‘Buried’, while most of the really original work has been coming from Spain, South America, Korea and even […]