In case you missed it last year, here's Jassy's Easter recipe... There were two high points to my Easter Sundays when I was a child. First, waking up to find that the Easter Bunny had indeed come a-hopping and left me a chocolate egg at the bottom of my bed. The ... Read More...

In this week's cupboard, a marvellous extract from “Howtoism” by Dwight Macdonald, collected in Against The American Grain(1962): The way to deal with eelworm in phlox is to spray with Murphos, a paraltrion curb. The way to avoid being slighted by bus drivers, waiters and salesgirls is to be unselfish, self-confident, ... Read More...

Jonathon Green continues his series on English linguistic xenophobia with a crack at the Germans - and finds that slang hasn't been quite as unkind to them as you might think... Has anyone seen a Germin band, Germin Band, Germin Band?  I want my Fritz, What plays tiddley bits On the big trombone! Robert Tressell ... Read More...

When we selected last month’s Dabbler Book Club choice, which you can buy here, we wondered whether the author was able to pull off what sounded like quite an outrageous proposition. Well does he? Brit: The central conceit of Hope: A Tragedy would have made a fine episode of South Park: it is ... Read More...

Luke Honey writes about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. Today we find our intrepid reporter in deepest Kent in search of the perfect seafood restaurant... We've just discovered a little gem of a fish restaurant; a tiny place in Herne Bay. ... Read More...

Dabbler hero Sid Waddell hasn't been well lately. Here's Brit's tribute to the great commentator, one of a few archive posts we'll be running over the holiday period... For years hence there will be gnarled Geordies huddled over schooners of broon and Red Bull, claiming they were there in the auditorium ... Read More...

This week, Gerhard Richter and the grottification of cities - it's another extraordinary bulletin from Norbiton... Norbiton is a city of Ideas, not of stone, so on my occasional visits to London, I am struck by how rapidly a stone city can change: set down a crane and over weeks and ... Read More...

In this series Philip Wilkinson – author, architectural historian and denizen of the wonderful English Buildings Blog – takes us on a journey round some buildings with rather unlikely creators... Son of a tradesman and grandson of a refugee Flemish merchant, John Vanbrugh began his career as a soldier, won a ... 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...

Philip Larkin, full of the joys of Spring? Nige thinks so... A while ago, over on the excellent First Known When Lost, Steve Pentz quoted Solar as a demonstration that Philip Larkin was not 'the dour personage of caricature'. Indeed not, though he could adopt the dour persona with wonderful conviction. ... Read More...