The strange ways of internet commerce have meant that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. The Dabbler will be recommending some of the out-of-print, forgotten or neglected gems that can be yours, at the time of writing, for a penny. Today, guest writer Jon Hotten recommends ... Read More...

I came across this terrific description of a Roman Catholic home the other day: The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, ... Read More...

For those who enjoy news about the relationship between monkeys and flying squirrels, and also good uses of the words ‘might’, ‘possible’, ‘insights’ and ‘important’ in the field of evolutionary psychology, this story will be most welcome. (My emboldening.) Researchers have observed small monkeys called Japanese macaques going bananas at the ... Read More...

I popped into the elegantly bijou Estorick Collection the other day to see their latest exhibition: Siren City, photographs of Naples taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd.It played, quite beautifully, to just about every preconception you might have about the city. Use of black-and-white film and an old camera (a Rolleiflex - I made a note ... Read More...

Frank Key of Hooting Yard and our own Key's Cupboard is taking advantage of the wonders of web publishing to post his mother's wartime memoirs in weekly instalments at a blog, Ghent in Wartime: During the 1980s, my mother [Lydia Brusseel] wrote a memoir of her teenage years in Belgium during World War ... Read More...

Dabbler Country will be another recurring feature on the site, as our intrepid dabblers - headed by the web's leading nature-noter Nige - venture into the Great Outdoors.For the debut, Nige on August and swifts... August Every schoolchild knows that August is the best month of the year. Every adult ... Read More...

The evidence would suggest that piano virtuosity and wild eccentricity go hand-in-hand. This Sunday, here are three of the most troubled Greats (and this is not even to mention David Helfgott, made famous by the movie Shine, or Grigory Sokolov, who takes each piano apart before playing it and makes ... Read More...

Susan Muncey, blogger, trend forecaster and founder-curator of the magnificent online curiosity shop, ShopCurious.com, is the latest columnist to join the ranks of The Dabbler.Her exclusive style column - RetroProgessive - will appear every Saturday. This is Style, Dabbler-style. Expect the beautiful, the strange and, above all, the unexpected... Something for the ... Read More...

This is a bit gimmicky but some are very effective. On the odd occasion, Berlin and its bullet-holed buildings can feel a bit like this anyway. There are a few other cities featured too. ... Read More...

By Frank Key Rupert Murdoch has his paywall, but how does the average impoverished scribbler eke some cash out of the internet? A Paypal button to solicit donations is all very well, but it doesn't exactly tug at the heartstrings, does it? What is needed is a good old-fashioned hard ... Read More...