This week, the embellishment of monastic chant, and why we have been caught for a thousand years in a very pleasant and rewarding but nonetheless insane digression... Not long ago I attempted, in a quarterly online magazine called The Junket,  a defence of what we call in Norbiton the Failed Life. The ... Read More...

Nature writing is something we enjoy and sometimes do here at The Dabbler. The next Dabbler Book Club selection is right up our woodland path: Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Here's what Philip Hoare, himself no mean writer about nature, thought of Sightlines: Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet, has written a book that ... 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. The latest episodes can be heard below. You can catch up ... Read More...

Continuing from last week's post, which looked at three great paintings with dark backgrounds, Malty expands, taking in Richter, understrappers and the meaning of art... There is another dimension to these three paintings, in that they reside in what must be their natural setting. Mrs Ionides, from an era when the 'if ... Read More...

"You buy a bag of peanuts in this town, you get a song written about you"... This week Brit considers the musical legacy of Orson Welles’  masterpiece Citizen Kane... The gloriously awful singer Florence Foster Jenkins, as featured in Mahlerman’s post about unserious music, put me in mind of the opera scene ... Read More...

This week, at the Milan Furniture Fair, the pieces on show will become the talk of the world. However, few people can afford the luxury of having their home interior designed as and when the whim takes them. Most people need a very good reason to buy new furniture. Usually, ... Read More...

Jon Hotten is struck by an old English sitcom's "quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair", which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket... You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that English, because it could only be English - sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of ... Read More...

In this week's cupboard, some sort of yarn or fable, or what have you... Simple Simon met a pieman. “Hullo! I'd like to buy a couple of your pies, please,” said Simon, slobbering as he spoke, as is the way with simpletons. “My pies are not for sale,” replied the pieman, “But you ... Read More...

Jonathon is away this week, so here's a gem from the archives, in which Mr Slang allows us a glimpse of the curious life of the lexicographer... This is what I do. What I have done for at least 25 years and what I intend to do, audience and body willing ... Read More...

Frasier and Niles were always guzzling some presumably upmarket tipple in the famous sitcom. But what exactly were they drinking? Henry can reveal the shocking truth... The sherry marketing board should have made more of the Crane brothers’ love of sherry. In every episode of the long-running sitcom Frasier there they ... Read More...