The Atlas of Norbiton is a weekly bulletin from Norbiton: Ideal City of the Failed Life. Unlike its more comprehensive, detailed and discursive mother site, the Anatomy of Norbiton - hailed by Nige as "a thing of strange beauty and wonder, inspired by the South London nowhere known as Norbiton" - the Atlas is intended as a pocket guide to ... Read More...
Month: January 2012
Announcing the winners of this month’s Dabbler Book Club choice… Way back in October, Dabbler Elberry treated us to a stirring review of a book that had started making waves in the publishing industry - having been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a dark and ... Read More...
To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we'reclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. Chapters 3 and 4 can be heard below. You can catch up ... Read More...
The Epicurean Dealmaker writes anonymously, insightfully and wittily on the world of investment banking, the first because he works in the industry as a senior M&A banker. If you want to understand, and even find amusing, the rarefied and controversial world of high finance you won't do much better than ... Read More...
This week Brit looks beyond the saxophone, trumpet and piano for some less obvious jazz soloists. Here are four increasingly unusual lead instruments. You won’t believe the fourth… In the (extremely amusing) film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Bergundy, Will Ferrell has his hero reveal an unexpected talent for ‘jazz flute’ ... Read More...
Susan is away this week, but that does give us another opportunity to publish her magnificent Dabbler Style Guide, which will enable you to establish what 'brow' you are... Inspired by the above magnificent chart from a 1940s edition of TIME magazine (click on it for a larger picture), which purports to ... Read More...
Elberry puzzles over a 'novel in dramatic form' from the author of No Country for Old Men and The Road... Here is a puzzling thing. McCarthy, who is generally known for harrowing tales of bloodshed and mutilation, has written a play starring a ex-crim and a suicidal professor, sitting at a ... Read More...
Readers of a milksop disposition, look away now! for Frank is about to besmirch the pages of The Dabbler with pure unbridled filth... According to John Trevelyan in What The Censor Saw (1973), the following list includes some of the disgusting and morally repugnant subjects rightly banned by the British Board ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang has teamed up with quiz-master Brit Snr (the editor's Dad, no less) to give you the chance to win a copy of his splendid big fat red Chambers Slang Dictionary... I have been dabbling for twelve months now. There or thereabouts. Many posts, many words, many slang ... Read More...
Nige appreciates female poets in general, and Kay Ryan in particular... Brit once made the observation that I read an awful lot of female novelists. It hadn't really occurred to me, but of course he's right - I do. Why? It's certainly nothing programmatic - it's just that (as it seems to me) for ... Read More...