Something a bit different for this week’s RB Quiz, which has been supplied, funnily enough, by my Dad – a keen and fiendish crossword champion. It comes in two parts. Brit the Elder has supplied 10 cryptic clues: the first five clues are below, the rest will follow tomorrow. To make it ... Read More...
Month: May 2011
In an occasional series Daniel Kalder examines the literary endeavours of the world's dictators. This week we hear about a dictator who was not only the world's most feared literary critic but also an unlikely poet of women's moles and 24-hour taverns. Perhaps the most famous literary critic of the 20th ... Read More...
The Dabbler's drinks writer Ian Buxton – author of the bestselling 101 Whiskies to Try Before You Die – uncovers some historic whisky... A most unusual whisky has just come to light after spending the last 100 years in the Antarctic ice cap. Explorer Ernest Shackleton prepared very thoroughly for his 1908 ... Read More...
A couple of years ago, I went to interview Keith Deller, 1983 World darts champion. He took the crown in one of darts’ most famous matches, an upset win over the allegedly unbeatable Crafty Cockney, Eric Bristow. In the pre-Sky, four-channel era, the final went out on one of those ... Read More...
The classic rock line-up is of course: Vocalist, Guitarist, Bassist, Drummer. Keyboardists tend to be fringe players. Beyond that, apart from the odd notable saxophonist, if you need some horns or strings to give your record a bit of an epic orchestral sound because you’ve run out of other ideas ... Read More...
Want to get some free books? Fancy yourself as a reviewer? The Champion by Tim Binding has been described as “a brilliant small-town story of Britain's recent past” and a “magnificent social satire” by The Times. It “chronicles the vertiginous period from Thatcher to Blair – years all the more prescient for ... Read More...
On a recent tour of the Royal Academy of Music Museum, the violin was described by Peter Sheppard Skaerved as “the epitome of understatement in working with wood.” A lapsed violinist, I’d never really contemplated the design of my instrument – just its sound. Suddenly, thanks to Peter, the skillfully ... Read More...
The Dabbler reviews new seven-part conspiracy drama The Shadow Line (BBC Two, Thursday, 9pm). The Shadow Line starts beautifully. We are in pitch darkness and then two pale lights (fireflies? flares?) trickle down the screen, eventually revealing themselves to be torches borne by policemen, viewed from directly overhead, as they approach ... Read More...
There lay exposed a strange little brown image, a root of the potato species distorted into human shape, with grotesquely human features, nose, lips, the indication of eyes, and hairy filaments falling from the sides of the head and forming a kind of beard upon the shrivelled jaw and chin. ... Read More...
I have been dabbling – juste-est of mots – in the world of 1840s Australia. The dictionary may have been published but the database’s appetite for new material, or in this case old material, is unsatable and a friend in SlangWorld recently reminded me that Australia’s earliest newspapers for the period ... Read More...
