Nige pays tribute to a nearly-forgotten comic whose work seems remarkably contemporary... Under Mahlerman's Sunday post on Unserious Music, Worm mentions the once very famous and popular Gerard Hoffnung. That name took me right back to my boyhood. One of my uncles had a recording of Hoffnung's legendary stand-up (and sway ... Read More...
Month: March 2012
We appear to be growing a weekly beard feature. Today Daniel Kalder combs through some notable beards from the world of popular music. Last week Susan offered us a fine post on Biblical beards. Among the images selected to illustrate the text was a photo of Billy Gibbons, lead guitarist for ... Read More...
Are you inspired by the city-slickness of the cast of Mad Men? The press has long been telling us that sharply cut suits, club ties and brogues are making a comeback – and retailers have strongly bought into this trend. But men’s streetwear at London Fashion Week (surely an indication ... Read More...
Kicking off a new series , we welcome the return of Philip Wilkinson - author, architectural historian and denizen of the wonderful English Buildings Blog - to take us on a journey round some buildings with rather unlikely creators... Do architects dabble? Most architects would probably scorn such an idea. Nowadays ... Read More...
A cautionary tale of the perils of literary success, from Andrew Marvell's The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672): Nothing now would serve him but he must be a madman in print, and write a book of Ecclesiastical Policy. There he distributes all the Territories of Conscience into the Princes Province, and makes the ... Read More...
A ribald, rollicking historical treat for you this week, as Mr Slang brings to vivid life the world of the 'penny gaff' theatres of London... It is impossible to contemplate the ignorance and immorality of so numerous a class as that of the costermongers, without wishing to discover the cause of ... Read More...
Announcing the winners of this month’s Dabbler Book Club choice… Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander is a bizarre and controversial novel, which we announced as our latest Dabbler Book Club choice here. For some ten lucky winners of a copy, chosen at random from our book club members, Hope turned into Triumph: Graham ... Read More...
Brian Joseph Davis uses police identikit software to create sketches of famous literary characters. It's creepy... Do you recognise the man pictured above? You won't have seen him before, other than in your mind's eye, or possibly your nightmares. According to artist and blogger Brian Joseph Davis, this is what Humbert ... Read More...
Earlier this month the world’s greatest living Welshman turned 70. Fellow (albeit northern) Celt Daniel Kalder pays tribute. John Cale is 70. But this does not make him a joke. He never seemed young, nor was his art inspired by adolescent desire or angst, unlike most rockers. Even in the Velvet ... Read More...
Toby Ferris rummages through the orchestra's changing cast of instruments and finds some half-forgotten but powerful beliefs. The modern symphony orchestra is a ritual instrument of considerable, sometimes alarming incantatory power. In Roumeli (1966) Patrick Leigh Fermor describes the two kinds of flute in use among the Sarakatsani, a dwindling group of ... Read More...