I'm greatly enjoying Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchen's memoirs. They're worth reading solely for the sparkling tonic of his prose style, a distinctive aesthetic pleasure in itself. But, as one would expect, they also happen to be full of captivating ideas and observations as well as the usual expansive and apposite range ... Read More...
Month: September 2010
[The story so far...Ed Balls has failed to break into Rod Lidl's Top 5 Most Irritating Politicians list; Messiah White has applied for membership of The Spiked Armadillo; and Slavoj Zizek is still sending deranged analyses of Grayson Ellis's poetry to Janice Moor] The 2010 Liberal Guilt Society Conference Feeling frisky, Noseybonk this week swung ... Read More...
A Dabbler Country double bill today. We are delighted to present a post from Martin Wainwright. Martin has written numerous invaluable books about the countryside, is the northern editor of The Guardian and is a prolific blogger on the subject of moths... As an increasingly ancient journalist, I’ve lived through many stories ... Read More...
Yesterday, in Holland Park, I saw a boy in a tree. He was sitting contentedly at the top of a decent-sized ornamental maple, while a young woman - too young to be his mother - waited below with no sign of anxiety or concern. In due course the boy clambered ... Read More...
Last night's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? was an excellent example of why this series is so compelling. The actor, Hugh Quarshie (above), was in search of his roots on West Africa's Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana. One scene had him in his ancestral village meeting the local ... Read More...
I suspect that few readers of The Dabbler will have paid much attention to the recent reunion (including a BBC-televised performance at the Reading Festival) of the band The Libertines. Yet for countless indie girls and slightly-less-skinny-than-they-used-to-be NME-readers in their late 20s, this was a seriously Big Deal. This is one of ... Read More...
The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury is one of London's less well known. It's been refurbished in recent years, so when I dropped in I was curious to see if it had improved from the rather uncommunicative building I'd toured 20-odd years ago. Happily it's been a sensitive and quietly effective ... Read More...
Joseph O’Neill’s much praised (and, Gaw and I agree, pretty overrated) Netherland pitches into the crowded market of self-consciously literary psychological post-9/11 novels with an interesting ‘USP’, namely New York cricket. But the cricket played in NY little resembles the gentle, gentleman’s game that some, especially Americans perhaps, might envisage. It is a ... Read More...
Lovely weather we've been having the last few days. Very pleasant. And that's about as far as it goes for most of us, urbanites that we are. But it's been great news for arable farmers. World prices for wheat and barley may be high but a good proportion of an ... Read More...
Many moons ago, when I was a token female manager at a Japanese investment house, my elderly boss recounted fascinating stories of the way Japanese society had changed over the years. En route to one client meeting, he remarked upon the effects of Japanese girls’ increased wealth and freedom: they ... Read More...
