The finest programme currently on television is Only Connect. Cunningly scheduled to begin on BBC Four (not 'BBC4', note: being the most growed-up BBC channel, 'Four' is spelled out in full) just as University Challenge finishes on 2, and heralded by a similar diddle-diddle pseudo-classical theme maintaining the mood of ... Read More...

Monday marks the forty-seventh anniversary of the assassination of JFK, so here is a craft project to keep you occupied over the weekend. Hello readers! I am going to show you how to make a lovely scale model of Dealey Plaza, the site in Dallas, Texas, of the Kennedy assassination on ... Read More...

Slightly Foxed (the real readers' quarterly - buy a subsciption now!)  has kindly allowed The Dabbler to dip into its rich archives. We have handpicked this gem for you from the Autumn 09 edition, in which Richard Platt looks at  Dreamthorp by Alexander Smith: the best-loved, least-known book in the English ... Read More...

[The story so far… Slavoj Zizek has defeated Rod Lidl in an exclusive interview and, along with  Messiah White, has joined Tom Paulin's Real GEAS, paramilitary wing of the Grayson Ellis Appreciation Society. Art Garfunkel has written an Adult Contemporary hit by plagiarising Alain de Botton's Tweets, and Boris Johnson's Nanny ... Read More...

I know that it's winter because the miasmic reek of porridge hangs heavily over our office. It's bought into the building in cardboard cups, thick and stiff like wallpaper paste and glammed up with jam, bananas or compote. And thriftily, instant oats are stirred into milk and heated in the ... Read More...

A little while ago The Dabbler stumbled across this rather extraordinary and wonderful project - a  family tree tracing British pub names and signs. British pub signs are one of the great features of our cultural landscape and, you might say, our psychogeography (I know one lady who can only navigate, and give directions, ... Read More...

In our occasional feature we invite guests to select the six cultural links that might sustain them if, by some mischance, they were forced to spend eternity in a succession of airport departure lounges with only an iPad or similar device for company. Today's voyager is The Dabbler's very own ... Read More...

  Continuing our series looking at great paintings housed in London's National Gallery... In a room full of paintings, why does a particular one leap out? Practically every painting in the National Gallery would probably leap out if it were instead displayed in a common-or-garden gallery, so a painting housed here must ... Read More...

For much of the 1990s Toby Ash was a regular media commentator on Middle East and international affairs, before descending unexpectedly into the murky world of business and commerce. The Dabbler is pleased to announce that he has now miraculously reappeared on the most south-westerly tip of England from where ... Read More...

The release of Aung San Suu Kyi provides a happy opportunity to plug one of the best autobiographies I've read, The Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe, available for a mere penny here. It's written in a vivid and fresh style and is full of arresting images and ... Read More...