This week Frank Key recalls one of the great child actors, and asks: "Whatever happened to Tad Wensleydale?"... A haggard, wizened old man, impossibly ancient, creaks across the stage, barely able to support himself on his battered crutches, which give off a powerful stench of linseed oil and dubbin. One of ... Read More...
Month: October 2011
Jonathon Green salutes that great Australian stereotype and master of slang, the 'larrikin'... Let us first describe the captain, bottle-shouldered, pale and thin, For he was the beau-ideal of a Sydney larrikin; E'en his hat was most suggestive of the city where we live, With a gallows-tilt that no one, save a larrikin, can ... Read More...
As the Rugby World Cup hots up Gaw considers why Wales backs youth and admires craftiness. This Saturday Wales play Ireland in one of the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals and look an exciting prospect. The credit for how they're playing is going to a talented group of young players: Teenage wing George North, fly-half ... Read More...
Sports historian James Hamilton marvels at the pioneering works of film, sound and photography which, once lost, are now freely available again on the internet, and he ponders their profound impact on our sense of history... One of the joys of sports history is that you get to involve yourself in the work of media pioneers: ... Read More...
A “monstrous collection of platitudes”? Harry Paget Flashman makes some modest remarks on the founding documents of the United States of America... I hope that by now you all subscribe to the excellent quarterly magazine Slightly Foxed – the real reader's quarterly. If The Dabbler has a soulmate in quarterly printed ... Read More...
Well done to JL, Worm and also to John Halliwell, whose theory, as well as being as brilliant as ever, was for once somewhat accurate, containing as it did the Marrakesh link... Click continue for the full answer... 18126 ... Read More...
This week's devilishly fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here) has been set by Nige. This is a 'links in the chain' question, rather than one with a single overall connection... How would you get from a lemon city to a red city by way of ... Read More...
Those who have been following the remarkable case of the plagiarising, Wikipedia-manipulating Independent journalist Johann Hari will know that he has handed back his Orwell award (the plaque that is, not necessarily the cheque) and gone back to journalism school to learn how to write proper. His first assignment of the term was, naturally, ... Read More...
The classics have virtually vanished from our state schools. Dr Peter Jones MBE, who writes the regular Ancient and Modern column in The Spectator and is now advising the Classics for All campaign, explains why we need to save Latin from educational oblivion... Bettany Hughes was recently filming in a small village in Syria. The ... Read More...
The strange ways of internet commerce mean that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. Today ZMKC turns up an interesting title. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (available here for a penny) is the first Iris Murdoch I'd read. It was published in 1970 (and yet, amazingly, contains a ... Read More...
