Those of you who have yet to purchase a subscription to the excellent magazine Slightly Foxed(the real reader's quarterly) should do so now, because the current edition features The Dabbler's editor Brit writing racily about Flashman. Buy it now! In the meantime, here's an excerpt from the very first edition of ... Read More...

Jon Hotten on the small but long-lasting humiliations of playing sport... It's funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another ... Read More...

It's safe to say that the next Dabbler Book Club selection is a publishing one-off. This month you have the chance to win a copy of Shalom Auslander's unlikely novel Hope: A Tragedy. This is Auslander's self-described "Persuasively Written Book Jacket Copy": Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens ... Read More...

Toby Ferris considers the significance of the physical act of writing, from scratching with an old nibbed pen to double-thumbing on tiny virtual keypads. I still occasionally write with a pen – as the draft of this post will bear witness: Writing with a pen is not just a minor feat of ... Read More...

As the Leveson Inquiry trundles interminably on, guest poster Michael Noble (aka @Contact_Light) revisits Evelyn Waugh's classic novel about hack behaviour... One of the favoured resorts of tabloidese is the word ‘tragic’, easily inserted into a pithy headline, or appended as an adjective. It would be all too tempting also to apply ... Read More...

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we're exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. Chapters 13 and 14 can be heard below. You can catch ... Read More...

The Marshman Chronicles’ Gareth Rees interviews Charlie Tuesday Gates about buried hamsters, boiled crabs and veganism. What The Dabbler needs, I announced to myself one day, is a rough guide to turning dead animals into art. And with that I jumped on a bus from Clapton to Stamford Hill to talk to artist ... Read More...

This week Mahlerman shows that losing an arm need not mean the end of a pianist's career... When Paul Wittgenstein woke up in a Russian field hospital in 1914 he was missing his right arm and was effectively a prisoner of war. A shock for anybody, it was particularly so for ... Read More...

If you are looking for something to do on a Saturday between now and the end of the month, I can recommend a visit to Sands Films Studio in Rotherhithe. Go along for tea and cake at 4.0 pm, followed by a tour of the premises and a screening of ... Read More...

The Dabbler is proud to draw your attention to a prize, which, for the avoidance of doubt, is not an invention of Mr Frank Key. The shortlist for The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year has been announced. It contains seven titles "one more than the traditional ... Read More...