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 5 and 6 can be heard below. You can catch up on previous chapters ... Read More...
Month: February 2012
Gwyn visits 'the Taj Mahal of Wales' and recalls a remarkable impromptu lunch cooked by none other than the late, great Fanny Cradock... We slouched into a pub last week, the Clytha Arms on the old Abergavenny to Raglan road. There were more dogs than people in the stone-flagged bar, and I ... Read More...
Today, Mahlerman examines the legacy of James Joyce: the language in the music, and the music in the language... The great modernist writer James Joyce was so saturated in music that, for a while as a young man, he considered devoting his life to it, but although music's loss became literature's ... Read More...
On Monday I heard an item on Radio 4's Today programme about bees and colony collapse disorder – I can’t quite recall, but I think it may have been something to do with the ‘zombie’ parasite fly honeybee killer reported in Scientific American? On Tuesday I visited the Royal College of ... Read More...
On the eve of the 2012 Six Nations tournament, Gaw brings together his two loves: rugby and poetry... We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which ... Read More...
Read the following quotation, then declaim it aloud, then answer the questions: “Blenkinsop! Blenkinsop! Fain wert thou embrinaged there at the harbourside! No turncoat cutpurse at the ducking stool sought to jar thy chaps. Was it but a toughening that smudged such gobby vexations, or was a man o’ poultry glutted ... Read More...
This week our roving wordsmith Jonathon Green rummages around in the output of our most famous Victorian writer, Charles Dickens, to see whether his urban characters spoke much in the way of realistic contemporary argot... Dickens is 200 this year and who am I to eschew the bandwagon. Write, they say, ... Read More...
Nige explains why period television always gets it wrong… Television, that futuristic medium, is deeply in love with the past. It likes nothing more than sending people back in time to experience 'living in the past' for our delectation in 'historical reality shows' - Turn Back Time (shopkeepers sampling retail life ... Read More...
Henry wonders why wine writers have such uniquely one-track minds… There’s an article by Craig Brown (the humourist not the former Scotland football manager) about being present at the one and only meeting between Anthony Burgess and Benny Hill. Apparently it was not a great success. Though the two great artists ... Read More...
In today’s dispatch, Rita enjoys the latest US reality show… There are two hit shows on American television so far in 2012. One is a fantasy, Downton Abbey, in which we learn how the British handled their 1% a century ago. Apparently they imprisoned them in big old houses, forcing them ... Read More...