Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was bought from the agents of Henry VIII by a clothier named Mr Stumpe and converted into a woolen mill. When the antiquary John Aubrey visited in the 1660s the Norman nave still clattered with looms, and Mr Stumpe's great-grandson - Mr Stumpe, Esquire - plugged ... Read More...
Month: August 2010
The blockbuster Banksy vs Bristol exhibition (the opening day of which I reviewed here), was largely the business of walking round Bristol Museum going “Yes, heh heh, very smart, but is it art, dammit, is it art?” It was striking therefore to find a Banksy-vandalised Damien Hirst (about whom the ... Read More...
I don't know about you, but I'd only ever thought of 'Louis Vuitton' as a logo on rather vulgar baggage knocked off in Chinese sweatshops for the delectation of the chavocracy (of whom I've been seeing rather a lot lately, on my frequent train journeys on the Chiltern Line - ... Read More...
Variety acts are enjoying a revival up at the Edinburgh Fringe:...venues devoted to the outpourings of alternative comedians since Ben Elton first performed at the fringe in the boom years of the early 1980s are increasingly making room for singing acts, burlesque artists and magicians.There's even talk of the spirit of music ... Read More...
At Touching From a Distance (now incorporated into The Spectator), guest poster Prof David McMenemy offers various arguments for the importance of public libraries. At least, he talks a lot about ‘learning spaces’ and ‘vital cogs in the wheels of societal development’ and says things like "in a digital world ... Read More...
“I threw up a little in my mouth when I realized I would have to read that ugly font throughout the film,” says one blogger of 'Papyrus', the font used by James Cameron for the subtitles in Avatar. Thus proving once again that there is no area of life so ... Read More...
[We try to offend only when we mean to here at The Dabbler so I should warn you that this post contains some bad language. It's at the end. There'll be something else along soon enough if you don't fancy it.] I like reading American political history and I love reading ... Read More...
The 1p Book Review will be another regular feature on The Dabbler. 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 ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon is going to be a weekly feature here at The Dabbler: a bit of musical accompaniment to not doing very much at all. Given its name is taken from a Small Faces song we'll start with them and with that very song (along with a couple of ... Read More...
