image © Gabriel Green Jonathon Green - or 'Mr Slang' as Martin Amis has called him - is the English language's leading lexicographer of slang. His lifetime's labour has recently come to fruition with the publication of the epic 3-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang. Covering 500 years of language, it is ... Read More...

Last Sunday night's Aurelio Zen mystery (three episodes on BBC1, Sunday 8pm), Vendetta, was remarkably coherent for the genre. The plots of TV thrillers rarely stack up, even in the ninety-minute-plus format spacious enough to accommodate a comprehensive effort. Even the first and most successful of this particular sub-genre, Morse - despite its ... Read More...

Relatively new to The Dabbler? Now's the time to catch up. Although only 5 months old, The Dabbler already has a rich archive in which to delve. Here are a few you might have missed from our early days... Brit interprets a terrifying family portrait in The Cobham Cuckoos and Gaw looks at some ... Read More...

Hardcore fans of the rock aristocracy can get terribly precious, making it all the more important to occasionally pop a pompous balloon. Here are four highly unusual or inventive covers of the biggest dinosaurs of them all... I don’t know who Goldbug were or where they’ve gone now, but they had ... Read More...

The term ‘rock music’ covers a vast range of sounds, from concept albums that adapt literary classics, to two-minute pop records where the lyric is no more sophisticated than “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” At the jazzy-folky end of the rock spectrum is a sub-genre that fits well with our concept of ... Read More...

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the Christmas break? I managed to get away for a few days – and, during a long car ride, caught snippets of the BBC Radio 4 programme You and Yours, where Julian Worricker asked members of the public how the modern family has ... Read More...