For the benefit of The Dabbler's international readership - and probably for many puzzled inhabitants of what we still call the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island - Daniel Kalder explains the how, when, why and wherefore of this independence malarkey. As a Scot living abroad, I am often asked ... Read More...
Month: January 2012
Inspired by Rita's 'letter from America' column, but not willing to come and live in England, David Cohen provides a US perspective of the English - a sort of 'Dispatches (not quite) from the Former Old World' - beginning with a look at our geography... For a while this winter, my ... Read More...
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 ... Read More...
Continuing our occasional series featuring some of the finest pictures in London's National Gallery, Gaw looks at a crucifixion scene that's unusually troubling even for this genre... The current work-in-progress of Mark Alexander, a painter and friend of The Dabbler, is inspired by Christ Mocked (The Crowning by Thorns) by Hieronymus Bosch. He ... Read More...
It won’t have escaped your notice that 2012 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. To mark it, we have an audio treat for you on The Dabbler... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we will be exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, ... Read More...
Brit visits a new 'craft beer bar' slap-bang in the middle of Bristol's Studentsville, and wonders if, despite everything, the world has become a better, more civilised place... You may not credit it, but I have not always been the suave, immaculately-attired, dashingly handsome Brit familiar to millions of Dabbler readers. Once I was ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman's ears are ringing... Whilst not exactly littered with (good) examples the bell, in all its many forms, is quite common throughout the classical music canon, at least from the mid 19th Century onward. Gustav Mahler had a particular weakness born of a peculiar sentimental streak that somehow managed ... Read More...
This time of the year is hell for regular gym-goers like me. In the New Year rush to achieve bodily perfection, classes are full to bursting point with uncoordinated newbies, whose lack of spatial awareness makes even the most basic of aerobic moves positively hazardous. Nevertheless, as the debate rages ... Read More...
Brit enjoys the opening episodes of the latest Danish drama import Borgen, but worries that it might have already jumped the shark... Borgen, being on BBC Four (Saturday 9pm), Danish, and set in the world of media and politics, has inevitably got the Twitterati excited but the challenge for the reviewer ... Read More...
This week Frank offers tips on reenacting an important Biblical scene... Nebuchadnezzar made a huge golden idol, and at its dedication proclaimed that at the sound of special music everyone must worship. But Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused. Chaldean nobles informed the King of their defiance, and he angrily threatened to ... Read More...
