Queen Gin: Oh! what is is this that runs so cold about me? A dram! — a dram! — a large one or I die. ’Tis vain [drinks hastily] O, O, Farewell [dies] Mob: What, dead drunk or dead in earnest? [finale of The Deposing of Queen Gin, with the Ruin of the Duke of Rum, Marquee ... Read More...
Month: June 2011
For me, it was Rembrandt's Portrait of His Mother (the one in the Royal Collection), in a black-and-white reproduction in an encyclopaedia. I was 9 or 10 at the time, and this was the first picture I saw that moved me, and gave me an inkling of what a painting ... Read More...
Launching a new occasional series for the Dabbler, Rita Byrne Tull brings us our very own version of 'Letter from America'... Two score and one years ago I boarded a student charter flight and crossed the ocean to the New World. I had just $200 in my pocket and a backpack ... Read More...
Photos of the mysterious Pyongyang taken by British photographer Charlie Crane. These are all official tourist sites in the city and Crane was escorted to each site as part of a monitored trip. There are over 3.5 million residents in the city, which is plunged into darkness every evening due ... Read More...
Some of my most enduring memories of the two years I spent as a graduate student at Oxford are of the times I spent with Norman Stone, then the university’s professor of modern history. He was very clever but also witty, provocative and just damn fun to get drunk with. I ... Read More...
Continuing our series looking at great paintings housed in London's National Gallery... Dating from around 1540, this arresting painting depicts an unlovely pair of taxmen, evidently just as popular in 16th century Zeeland (in the Netherlands) as they are everywhere today. It is agreed to be unlikely that Marinus painted from a ... Read More...
From a vantage point in today's Russia, Scottish-born Daniel Kalder reflects on the butts of jokes, past and present. Although I am still in my mid-thirties I am often struck by how much the world has changed in my lifetime. For instance, I remember when it was acceptable to make jokes about ... Read More...
Ian Vince's The Lie of the Land (buy it here) has won all manner of favourable recognition, most recently at the Hay Festival where it was named the National Trust's 2011 Outdoor Book of the Year. Here's a geology taster, followed by the chance to win a free copy. If there’s ... Read More...
“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The "secret river" has long been an obsession of dabblers, perhaps since the times when we lived in caves, and our ancestors ... Read More...
After my foray a fortnight ago into machine music, it's time for some human voices. Here are four singular singers at their finest... West Side Story is the king of the musicals, and nobody has sung Somewhere, the ne plus ultra of doomed-romantic light arias, better than gravelly old bugger Tom ... Read More...
