Congratulations to the following Dabbler Book Club members Kirsty Bowyer Annette Crossling Michael Buck Frances Hopkins Jonathan Law Sarah Chapman John J Graham Jon Smith Caroline Maffia Samantha O’Keefe Sarah Bailey John Halliwell - you've each won yourselves a free review copy of Mark Mason's Walk The Lines, these books will be winging their way to you shortly, and we look forward to ... Read More...
Month: July 2011
One of the brightest of bright ideas in Interwebshire was the recognition that a blog was the perfect medium for the (re)publication of journals and diaries from the past. I think the first of these was The Diary Of Samuel Pepys, where “a new entry written by Pepys [is] published ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his eye-popping slang tour of London with a look at St Giles, once described as offering ‘the lowest conditions under which human life is possible’... The first time I saw the flaming mot, Was at the sign of the Porter Pot. I called for some purl, and we had it ... Read More...
Above is Lawrence Alma-Tadema's innocently titled painting The Tepidarium. And the question you ask yourself is - how did those Victorians get away with it? Alma-Tadema, a Dutchman who became a giant of the high Victorian art scene, features largely in Victorian Olympus, part of William Gaunt's trilogy on Victorian painters (The ... Read More...
In an exclusive article for The Dabbler, Mark Mason, author of this month's Dabbler Book Club choice Walk the Lines (published today), explains how he came to walk the entire London Underground network, overground... My project to walk the entire London Underground network overground started as a way of ‘conquering’ the city – ... Read More...
I'll say this for C.S.Lewis: he knew how to coin a memorable book title. The Screwtape Letters. Surprised By Joy. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe... but my personal favourite was Till We Have Faces, the title of a short novel about the battle between sacred love and profane. ... Read More...
With our resident foodie Jassy still recovering from a horrendous-sounding operation on her poor eyes, guest blogger Monix steps into the Dabbler kitchen with a tip for making the most of the e.coli-free cucumber mountain... Cucumbers have had such a bad press recently that the shops are almost giving them away; ... Read More...
Our friends at Slightly Foxed (the real readers' quarterly - buy a subscription now!) have once again kindly allowed The Dabbler to dip into its rich archives. In this article from the Autumn 2004 edition (issue 3),author Julia Keay recounts a remarkable river journey... I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often ... Read More...
Martin Morgan is a Welsh blogger, exiled to England for his love of fine living. His main achievements are founding the Cymru Rouge hyper-nationalist fraction and coining the word "chwerthfawr". Andrew Rawnsley, in his excellent book on New Labour ,"Servants of the People", refers to Wales as Scotland’s “ugly sister”. This is a ... Read More...
Philip Wilkinson is the author of over 40 books, including The English Buildings Book, and most recently The High Street, written in conjunction with the BBC TV series. Happily for us, he’s also the curator of the English Buildings Blog, a firm favorite here at The Dabbler. In this new ... Read More...
