Here's this week's fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here). As usual, find the link between these cryptic clues. A point for each item you get, and an imaginary cream bun if you get them all. If you get the link straight off, please ... Read More...

Toby Ash, our Most South-Westerly Tip of England Correspondent, has fallen in love with the beautiful lines and stylish curves of his local lido... I have never found leisure centres particularly leisurely. Verruca-infected floors, the smell of chlorine and the echoing screams of feral minors often combine to raise the hackles, ... Read More...

Hard Times’ reputation is a bit of a mixed bag. FR Leavis claimed, absurdly, that it was the only Dickens novel worth consideration; George Bernard Shaw criticised the anti-Trade Union element and Thomas McCauley called it ‘sullen socialism’. Certainly there are sound arguments both for and against Hard Times (available for ... Read More...

As I've mentioned before, on my own blog, one of the advantages of living in Australia is the access it gives you to European films and television programmes (odd, really, considering our geographical position, but no-one seems to be complaining). As a result, Danish programmes have become a staple of the Australian ... Read More...

  For the last, say, one hundred years, the musical landscape of the world has become ever more fractured - and this fragmentation has been helped along by artists who resist a single classification, either through personal choice or by a vaulting ambition or genius. Some emerge from the womb with ... Read More...

When I typed ‘retro games’ into my browser I was a little surprised at the result. The sites featured were the sort selling ‘retro video games and classic retro gaming’. Atari, Commodore, Ninetendo, Sega, Sinclair and Playstation were not exactly the names I’d anticipated. So I typed in ‘retro toys’ ... Read More...

Readers of Nigeness will know that I recently reread Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies. Having consulted Amazon, I see that it qualifies for a 1p Book Review, so here goes... Malone Dies, published in French in 1951 and English (translated by the author) in 1956, is classed by some - not the ... Read More...

This week, I thought it was about time I provided Dabblerists with some useful information, instead of the usual twaddle. And what could possibly be more useful than to discover the causes of fires, as noted in the May 1855 issue of The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and ... Read More...

Jonathon Green - visit his website here - is the English language's leading lexicographer of slang. His Green's Dictionary of Slang is quite simply the most comprehensive and authorative work on slang ever published. Now whatever you do, don't read today's post on a full stomach... This week I’d like to ... Read More...

[The story so far… Master Julian Assange has ordered his minions to capture elusive poet Grayson Ellis and notorious hack Rod Lidl has become entangled in the affair; Nina, Boris Johnson's Latvian nanny, is in pursuit.  Wayne Rooney has built a giant effigy of himself out of £50 notes; Ed ... Read More...