This week Mahlerman turns his attention to the visual arts - the work of great photographers accompanied, as you'd expect, by some remarkable music... Although all Dabblers dabble under the banner of Culture, an almost complete absence of it here in costal Spain invited me to consider what Culture actually is. ... Read More...
Month: January 2012
Happy New Year! I hope you had an enjoyable time over Christmas? Mine was somewhat quieter than expected… mainly due to the lack of a television signal. I’m sure there are many advantages of communal living, but sharing a satellite dish doesn’t seem to be one of them. I didn’t ... Read More...
The Dabbler's Cocktail Correspondent helps you face the New Year by mixing a much-needed winter warmer. It's January in England. And everywhere else for that matter. But here, especially, this means cold, dark, soggy evenings. Try this recipe as a winter-warmer, a traditional 'cure-all' for those seasonal sniffles, or as a delicious ... Read More...
Importantly, Frank is thinking about poets and biscuits this week... No one who has been exposed to British advertising for the past god knows how many years will be unaware that Mr Kipling makes exceedingly good cakes. The cakemaker shares his name, of course, with the poet of Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Incidentally, ... Read More...
This week Jonathon Green goes hunting with a Victorian writer who attacks head-on "a reality of contemporary life that Dickens almost wholly sidesteps"... Slang is urban and so am I and horses have never entered the picture. Maybe it's some residual memory of Cossacks. At the Lincolnshire Handicap of 1953, I ... Read More...
Gaw recalls some strange lodgings he took whilst playing rugby in South-West France. Being a professional sportsman isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's actually very boring. Training isn't mentally stimulating and professional sportsmen tend not to be that interesting; they're usually straight up and down. I was playing rugby in ... Read More...
You don't get stuff like this anywhere else. Today, join The Dabbler's inimitable Teutonophile Malty, as he takes us on a dizzying tour of Germany's musical autobahns... Brit's post on the DNA of Greek and German music was intriguing and begs a (somewhat belated) response. Regarding the Greeks, well, I dunno really, Vangelis, Zorba, ... Read More...
Dabbler Book Club member Shona give us her views on those of Clive (previous features on Mr James' latest book can be found here and here). A Point of View is just that. For those of us who remember Clive James' ten minute talks on BBC Radio Four, it is a welcome ... Read More...
Daniel Kalder looks back at the various vernal revolts of 2011 and argues we shouldn't get too excited. Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New ... Read More...
Blimey has 2011 ended already? We've been so busy reading our way through piles of brilliant books that we'd hardly noticed! We thought it might be nice to fill you in on what everyone's been reading, so here's The Dabbler Book Club's round up of the year just gone.... We've had ... Read More...
