Brit lists his complaints about his long-standing enemy Thom Yorke, composer of the greatest album by any British rock group... Objectively speaking, Radiohead are the second best rock group that Britain has produced, after the Beatles. This doesn’t mean that the Beatles and Radiohead ought to be your favourite bands. God ... Read More...
Month: November 2011
Worm makes a proper Dabbler soup... Yesterday was the first properly bitter and miserable day of winter, and when it's shivery cold and I'm driving home through the gloaming, I'm always thinking about rib-sticking winter food for dinner. This soup recipe is just the thing for cockle warming - very hearty, ... Read More...
Following Jon Hotten's review of Hood Rat - Gavin Knight's new survey of Britain's gang culture - Elberry takes on the underclass... One of the great pleasures of living in Germany is not living in England. In Germany disaffected youths scrawl pointless graffiti and dress in bright primary colours; in England, they take ... Read More...
Hood Rat - Gavin Knight's new book about Britain's gang culture - makes for uncomfortable reading. We have a double-bill for you, kicking off with Jon Hotten's review... In 1991, David Simon published a book called Homicide: Life On The Killing Streets, that followed for a year the work of three ... Read More...
Nige prescribes the correct attire for gentlemanly perambulations... Strolling on Blakeney marshes, I couldn't help but notice that everyone I passed was kitted out for Walking, as it is conceived in these car-bound times - not walking as in the most basic natural activity known to creatures afflicted with bipedalism, but ... Read More...
Gaw ruminates on the significance of Solzhenitsyn's final work in a world where even disaffected and idealistic Occupiers no longer really seem very sure of anything... In a little less than a month we mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. I haven't seen a single mention ... Read More...
Last week Mahlerman gave us some meaty musical Behemoths to munch on, so - having already covered the specky four-eyeses – I thought it might be apt to turn to those other playground unfortunates, the fatties. Gobble-gut, garbage-guts, guzzle-guts or gully-guts – I leave it to Jonathon Green to list the ... Read More...
A couple of months ago, our building suffered a series of power cuts due to a faulty circuit breaker. I hadn’t realized quite how much we depend upon electricity. The first outage struck at around 10.30 am. My laptop had about half an hour’s charge before it went dead. I ... Read More...
Elberry reviews Philip Connors' much-hyped chronicle of a season spotting wildfires in New Mexico... I came to this book via the usual marketing soundbites: masterwork, unforgettable, profoundly absorbing, absolutely compelling, and so on. Not many books can live up to such praise, and Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout ... Read More...
Following the appearance of Bernard ‘Massive, unflagging, moral, exquisitely shaped, enormously vital, enormously funny, strong, supple, human, ripe, generous and graceful’ Levin in Nige's post about the inflation of hyperbole in book blurbs, Frank remembers the great critic's take on pop music... Given that it was published in 1970, Bernard Levin’s ... Read More...