Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 288

5 ‘Lost London’ Books

Pictured above: The King’s Cross Aerodrome, an eight-runway nightmare developed by British Airways to balance on the tops of central London buildings and deliver plane passengers by lifts to the stations. There are a great many books about the London buildings that no longer physically exist, or never came to be. What we become aware [...]

Ideas Above Your Station

‘Remember when we were young and you still had an open mind?’ says a character in a film time has now erased from my atrophied brain. One of the challenges faced by an author is how to maintain an open mind as the passing years insist on proving that one’s instinctive fears were in all [...]

When Writing Goes Wrong

When I first started writing, a cruel fan immediately initiated something called ‘Fowler’s Howlers’, which listed the prose mistakes I’d made, usually very nitpicky ones, the kind dug out by someone with limited imagination. (Never work with the public if you’re sensitive; you’d kill yourself within days).

I rarely make grammatical errors, but I believe in [...]

The World Literacy List 2013

Adult Literacy Table

1 Japan

2 Finland

3 Netherlands

4 Sweden

5 Australia

6 Norway

7 Estonia

8 Slovak Republic

9 Flanders

10 Canada

11 Czech Republic

12 Denmark

13 South Korea

14 England

15 Germany

16 United States

17 Austria

18 Poland

19 Ireland

20 France

21 Spain

22 Italy

As usual with such listings, geographical, ethnic and density factors mitigate these results, with the most populous and economically migrant countries ranking lowest. Even so, there are [...]

Re:View – ‘Sunshine On Leith’

When the BAFTA website crashed last week, preventing bookings for the new season’s films, I knew I’d lost tickets to ‘Gravity’.

My partner tried other channels to get tickets. He called back; ‘I’ve got good news and bad news.’

‘What’s the bad news?’

‘You’re not coming.’

Great. So last night I sat in an almost empty cinema and watched [...]

Five Unusual London Objects No.3

1. The Beatrix Potter Tombstones

It turns out that Beatrix Potter’s characters were real after all. The celebrated children’s author used to take walks in Brompton Cemetery, and noted down the names on the tombstones she saw all around her. These include Mr Nutkins, Peter Rabbit, Mr McGregor and Jeremiah Fisher.

2. The Birch Dragon

There are boundary [...]

Another Five Unusual London Objects

1. The Beatrix Potter Tombstones

It turns out that Beatrix Potter’s characters were real after all. The celebrated children’s author used to take walks in Brompton Cemetery, and noted down the names on the tombstones she saw all around her. These include Mr Nutkins, Peter Rabbit, Mr McGregor and Jeremiah Fisher.

2. The Birch Dragon

There are boundary [...]

Re:View – ‘The Selfish Giant’

I’m going to break a taboo here, because the new British realism is getting me down. There was a time when this dyed-in-the-wool liberal would watch every neo-realist British film drama from ‘Kes’ to ‘This Is England’, but around the time of Andrea Arnold’s ‘Fish Tank’ I began to get an uncomfortable feeling. The British [...]

Crap Towns Returns!

Hurrah! The bible of God-awful places to live in Britain, ‘Crap Towns’, was produced by the creators of ‘Modern Toss’, and is now back for a second go-around in the latest volume, ‘Crap Towns Returns’. Shockingly in at Number One is London, for its hopeless late night transport system consisting of minicabs, rickshaws and night [...]

Re:View – ‘Love Crime’ / ‘Passion’

It’s rare that a remake so perfectly reflects the faults of the original version of a film, but Brian De Palma’s ‘Passion’ is every bit as stilted as the French ‘Love Crime’. Both have generic titles and both are utterly absurd. In the Alain Corneau-directed version, Ludivine Sagnier is Isabelle and Kristin Scott Thomas is [...]