Thanks to our friends at Picador, we've got no less than 24 great books to give away... Picador reaches its 40th anniversary this year, and to mark it they’re reissuing 12 of their most celebrated novels in a very cool new black-and-white cover design (read more about it here). We’ve got two ... Read More...

This week Frank gets misty-eyed and nostalgic about something or other. Hats are off in Docking; caps are being doffed. The council's got a town plan. The maths are on a chart. Pips have been spat out and drudgery is bye-byed. Chocolate puddings seem to be in everybody's pantry. And here ... Read More...

This week Jonathon faces the lexicographer's greatest fear: popular etymology... Humankind cannot bear too much reality. T.S. Eliot Four Quartets The word coiner, in the sense of counterfeiter, is first recorded in 1578. No doubt the result of an oversight (perhaps mine, I may have missed it) the current OED, source of this ... Read More...

Elberry puffs his way through a new and much-hyped short story collection... Short stories, like poems, are easy to write, and like poems they are usually worthless. Brevity tempts the would-be writer - easier to write a 5,000-word short story than a 100,000 word novel; and brevity makes the poem and ... Read More...

Daniel Kalder praises some German originals who seem to have sprung fully-formed from the head of Wotan. I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, ... Read More...

How did the USA end up with a National Anthem that's almost impossible to sing in tune? Rita investigates... It is tortured to death every weekend in sports stadiums across the nation – the notoriously hard to sing National Anthem of the United States, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A Mount Everest of ... 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...

Mid-January and we’re no doubt approaching what some discredited mathematical formula or other decrees is the ‘most depressing day of the year’. Certainly we’re all broke, tired, a year closer to death, facing another existential crisis. It’s perfect British beach weather… Previously on my extensive Dabbler Country tour of Britain’s seaside resorts I ... Read More...

Every month we award a bottle of Glengoyne 10 year old single malt - the finest whisky available to humanity - to a commenter who tickles our fancy... Blog commenters are quite a rare species, making up a small proportion of a blog's readers. My guess is that we're talking a small single ... Read More...

Nige looks at the historical but by no means dead sport of 'pedestrianism'... Back in 1773, at about this time of year, one Foster Powell (below) had just completed an epic walk, from London to York and back (396 miles) in less than six days, that won him a hefty bet and made ... Read More...