Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 29

More Books For Christmas Part Two

This selection pretty much sums up my appallingly narrow range of guilty pleasures, although theres not a good film book here as they seem to have fallen out of vogue, and there are no books exploring the back-alleys of British history this time. Scoff First up in Pen Voglers Scoff, a delightful look at foods []

Some Hardbacks For Christmas Part 1

This was the year in which hardbacks really came into their own. Suddenly £18 seemed a reasonable spend on a brand new novel when going out to dinner (remember that?) set us all back an awful lot more. But in these wretched times of political ineptitude, disease, loss and economic betrayals our tastes grow tame. []

Why We Remain A Divided Nation

How The Trent Became Englands Border  London is not Britain and Central London is not London; it has always been obvious to me that I lead a rarified life in the middle of what has now become the doughnut hole London is empty at the centre, dense at the edges. The population is moving []

Fowler’s Miscellany III

Now, Where Did I Put That Masterpiece? Cambridge University Library has announced that two notebooks filled by Charles Darwin have been missing for 20 years. One of them contains the 19th Century scientists famous Tree of Life sketch, exploring the evolutionary relationship between species. They were miscatalogued but academics reckoned they sort of knew where they were. []

In Conversation With Tim Goodman: The Voice Of Bryant & May

It seems extraordinary, but in all the time that Tim Goodman has been the voice of the Bryant & May audiobooks weve never talked about it, he and I. Now seemed a great time to chat a bit about his double career. Christopher: You began in rep, Tim. Thinking about life on tour, how difficult []

The Undoing: How I Knew Whodunnit Before I Saw It

How did a second-rate potboiler become a global phenomenon? (Spoilers galore) This week ‘The Undoing’ undid itself in the final episode of the six-part limited series from HBO. The hybrid murder mystery/courtroom drama, very similar to the much better novel and film ‘Presumed Innocent’ by Scott Turow, is a compendium of scenes from other crime […]

Fowler’s Miscellany II

But First, A Bulletin From Members Of The Maniac Community Give the people a referendum and you will soon cease to believe in democracy, Churchill pointed out. This week there were mass protests outside our station and through our surrounding streets as Anti-Maskers teamed up with every other dissident group to crowd through the tube […]

An Alternative Christmas Film List

I have never seen ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’. It wasn’t a Christmas perennial in our house and I only became aware of it long after I’d grown up. I still haven’t seen it but intend to this year, although I’m allergic to schmaltz. When I was growing up, in the wonderful world of two TV […]

The Surreal Thing

There are subjects I return to again and again for a final word. This is one of them. It started, as so many things do, with art. Magritte and Duchamp, Buñuel and Dali, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ and ‘L’Age D’Or’ and ‘Dr Caligari’. Many critics wrote off Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech because of his […]

Fowler’s Miscellany

Things that should not bother me but do.   It’s probably not bad grammar, especially from the Washington Post, and I hugely admire Americans for taking welcome shortcuts through language, but in my head this reads ‘lose even more badly’. Sorry. I’ve managed to adapt to ‘train station’ instead of ‘railway station’ and even ‘bored […]