A seasonal recipe for venison mincemeat, from the Dabbler's foodie whizz Jassy, who also blogs at Gin and Crumpets. The Christmas tree is up, half the Advent calendar doors stand gaping and the presents are a mess of wrapping paper and Sellotape, but there is still time to make your own mincemeat and have ... Read More...

The Dabbler interviews Roger Jones, the genius behind Brit's favourite beer... A bit tragic to admit it, but I can actually remember where I was when I had my first taste of Gem. It was 2005 and I was in the middle of a field just outside Chipping Sodbury, at, of all ... Read More...

Diary of a Nobody is a fictional account of the daily life of Mr Charles Pooter, a middle-aged City of London clerk. It was written by George Grossmith and illustrated by his brother Weedon in the late-1880s and was originally serialised in Punch. It's available in book form, unused and unsullied, for ... Read More...

So Peep Show is back with us, the nastiest and funniest of comedies. For those who don’t watch it, the show follows the grubby lives of two loser friends and flatmates.  One is a  wimp, a corporate drone and a geek (David Mitchell as Mark) and the other a chancer, a fantasist ... Read More...

Today is the last day to enter our competition to win one of three ‘Christmas Foxes’ from our friends at Slightly Foxed. They make ideal gifts for any literature-lovers you know (or for yourself) so hie thee over here now and enter – it’s free. Also, don’t forget that you can claim ... Read More...

Continuing our series looking at great paintings housed in London's National Gallery... A rather racy pair of treasures this week. Hilaire-Germaine-Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is considered to be one of the founders of Impressionism (he exhibited with Monet et al) but in fact he rejected the label – calling himself a ‘Realist’ – ... Read More...

There is only one starting point to any post on Arab music and that’s Egypt and the ‘Star of the East’ Umm Kulthum, who is widely lauded as the greatest Arab singer of the twentieth century. Born the daughter of an Imam in the Nile Delta in about 1900, her talent ... Read More...

Christmas brings with it many opportunities for sartorial embarrassment. A house party is the perfect occasion to bump into your fellow guests in a half-lit hallway in the middle of the night, wearing your brand new, or very old, dressing gown. As Oscar Wilde said, "It is only shallow people ... Read More...

Though never attaining the heights of William Topaz McGonagall (they are unattainable), James McIntyre has a decent claim to being one of the English language’s greatest bad poets. A Scottish-born Canadian furniture-manufacturer, what McIntyre lacked in poetic talent he made up for in narrow specialisation: odes to cheese. He just loved ... Read More...

I beg your pardon? I never promised you a rose garden. Go and look at the paperwork, where it is clearly stated that I promised you a ditch rife with puddles and nettles, teeming with tiny creatures, worms, flatworms, things with hundreds of legs and vibrating antennae, things with bulbous ... Read More...