This week Mr Slang settles back into the deep leather armchair in his favourite corner of the club and raises a fourth glass of port to the famous Loamshire regiment, heroes of innumerable imaginary battles... ‘All that remains is the orderly –sergeant’s voice reading orders to the new blood in the ... Read More...
Month: August 2011
Continuing our summer series of repeats, here's Dabbler editor Brit's 1p Review of a very unusual memoir, in which more is left unsaid than actually written... TH White, author of the strange and indelible Arthurian sequence The Once and Future King, is also the author of a strange and indelible memoir ... Read More...
About time we had some Elberry on this blog, isn't it? From the September 2010 archives, here he is dissecting a scene from Goodfellas... The last flawlessly great film of Robert de Niro's career. Jimmy Conway, the tough Irish hood, the murderer and hijacker and all round nice guy. Everyone likes Jimmy. ... Read More...
James Hamilton, the Dabbler's great sport-theory iconoclast and destroyer of accepted wisdoms, looks at some footballing 'Golden Ages'... I've been following football for thirty years - since the days of Ron Greenwood's England - and one minor consequence of that is that a younger generation now accuse me of having lived through ... Read More...
Continuing both our season of holiday repeats and this month's nostalgia theme, here's a lovely little Dabbler Country post from Nige, which originally appeared in September 2010... Yesterday, in Holland Park, I saw a boy in a tree. He was sitting contentedly at the top of a decent-sized ornamental maple, while ... Read More...
Dabbler editor Gaw ponders the ever-changing character of parts of London... I'm reading Iain Sinclair's book Hackney: That Red Rose Empire and something said by one of his interviewees seemed to encapsulate the social character of many of those parts of London which suffered in the recent turmoil, areas which are difficult to ... Read More...
This month's Dabbler Book Club choice is Alan Hollinghurst's much-anticipated The Stranger's Child. The Book Club members (join here if you haven't already!) drawn at random to receive a free copy are: Jo McPherson of Crawley; Cathy James of Grays; Sarah Parker of Bedford; Jamie Glew of Gosforth; Moira Douglas of Preston; Glenn ... 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. With the world's financial markets once again in turmoil, we thought this article from the Spring 2010 edition (issue 21) would be appropriate, as ... Read More...
In this week's music slot we look at how words can get in the way of meaning, even in pop... We'll be soaked and ruddy, comes for pearly dewdrops drops.. tis the lucky lucky penny penny penny buys the pearly dew drips soaks... I think we'd all agree with that, wouldn't we? There's ... Read More...
This time next year it will already be over. So how will we keep our memories of the 2012 Olympics alive? By shopping for souvenirs, of course. On visiting the Museum of 1951 at the Royal Festival Hall recently, I was struck by the high quality handiwork and timeless design ... Read More...
