Christopher Silvester has been a freelance journalist and author since the early 1980s. He cut his teeth on the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye, where he wrote the “New Boys” profiles of newly elected MPs during the Thatcher years. He also contributed to the Eye’s “Street of Shame” and “Grovel” columns as well as writing investigative reports on business.
He began writing profiles and interviews for the UK edition of GQ magazine under his friend Michael VerMeulen, who became the subject of his first ever obituary, in the Guardian in 1995. He subsequently wrote profiles for Esquire (UK), Time Out (London), the Sunday Correspondent Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Most of his obituaries have been for The Times of London. He has written about 50 obituaries for The Times and the 23 published to date have included: jazz singer Mel Tormé, Julius Epstein (one of the screenwriters of Casablanca), Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman, theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, US Senator Strom Thurmond, William Rehnquist (Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), photographer Cornel Lucas, US actors Jack Klugman and Charles Durning, US movie actress Juanita Moore, and French movie actress Danielle Darrieux. (These can be read at www.christophersilvester.com.)
In the UK, he has written for the following newspapers and magazines: the Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent Magazine, ES Magazine, Punch, the Spectator, Spectator Business, Spectator Money, Square Mile, and Another Man. He has also contributed to several US publications including Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, SPY, Fame, and the New York Observer.
Since 2006 he has been on the staff of Spear’s magazine, which covers the world of the London-based international super-rich and the various industries that service their needs. He was deputy editor from 2006 to 2015, editor for 2016, and is currently consultant editor as well as editor of The Spear’s 500 Travel Guide (including Aviation and Yachts (an annual publication).
He read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and has had various historical books published. He edited The Penguin Book of Interviews (published in the US as The Norton Book of Interviews); The Literary Companion to Parliament; The Penguin Book of Columnists; and The Penguin Book of Hollywood (published in the US as The Grove Book of Hollywood). He is currently writing a three-volume social history of Hollywood for Pantheon Books (Random House, Inc.), the first volume of which will be entitled Playground of the Gods: Inventing Hollywood Society, 1910-1939.
He was born in London and has lived there throughout his adult life, apart from a couple of years in the late 1990s when he was living in New York. During this time he was researching two books, but also reported on the trial of Mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante