Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 259

Should Colin And Meera Be Shipped?

Or should they remain Noromos? That’s today’s question. As the supporting characters in the Bryant & May books get the Springfield Effect, I could start shipping them into ColRa and JanRen. And if you’re lost already, let me explain that it’s that time of the year again when new words get added to the […]

This Is What A Bookshop Should Look Like

People always go on about London’s admittedly wonderful Daunt Books (which I visit a lot) but their frankly perverse cataloguing system prevents easy location of their stock, and the middle-class clientele who haunt the enquiry desk with oblique questions about Vita Sackville-West and the like do sometimes give me inexplicable shudders of horror. Tonight, though, […]

Overlooked Movies No.5

Original thrillers are not only hard to find – they usually flop at the box office. Recently ‘The Kovak Box’ was one such movie, in which the people surrounding SF writerTimothy Bottoms keep throwing themselves out of buildings. In this case two things undermined the movie – it was partly financed by the Majorca Tourist […]

Ever Lied About What You’ve Read?

We’ve all done it – suggested that perhaps we’ve read a little more than we have. At the age of 12 I tackled ‘War and Peace’ and told my mother I’d finished it when in fact I’d stalled halfway through. It took me 30 years to get around to the other half. When I set […]

Great London Pubs No.4: The Albion

The curse of the cupcake afflicts certain affluent areas of London – perfectly respectable pubs and restaurants are turned into frilly creches for the chattering classes. Trendy Canonbury is infested with them. Gone are the flatulent pub dogs and dimpled pint mugs, the kind of pubs where pork scratchings count as a main course, and […]

Are You On The List?

UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis has collated vast datasets to map the capital’s transformation from first-century Londinium to modern megacity. We often hear about listed buildings, but what is the scale of what was listed or lost in London? Here’s a fascinating look at what was saved and what was lost in London across […]

Adapt Or Die

Not everything can be turned into a brand. ‘Wolf Hall’ is next up for adaptation on stage and TV, and – please don’t let this be true – it’s rumoured that Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s company is planning to stage JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books – which would silt up the rest of London’s theatres for the […]

London Corners – Sicilian Avenue

It’s an odd little street where no cars can go, and all it does it cut off the corner of Southampton Row and Vernon Place near Holborn tube. It doesn’t have a very scintillating history; itwas built in 1910 and named because of its colonnaded old-world southern Italian appearance. Sicilian Avenue houses a branch of […]

Books About The Pleasures Of Reading

There’s a whole subcategory about reading that can teach you a lot about the pleasures of books. Lists of books that you must read before you die, books that will change your life, books about bluffing your way around the fact that there are certain books you haven’t read – books for book lovers. […]

Books About Books Part 1

There’s a whole subcategory about reading that can teach you a lot about the pleasures of books. Lists of books that you must read before you die, books that will change your life, books about bluffing your way around the fact that there are certain books you haven’t read – books for book lovers. […]