An old photograph leads Worm to go poking around an old scrapyard in search of the possible inspiration for a twentieth century masterpiece... Last week I happened upon this photograph of WW2 Blitz wreckage (click on it to enlarge - it's from this terrific set of photos), and immediately wondered if ... Read More...

Today's hero of slang is "a literary, literate fat man" who loved food and French girls' legs... I can write better than anybody who can write faster than me; and I can write faster than anybody who can write better than me. He should have lived hereafter, but instead, born in that annus ... Read More...

Thanks to our friends at Picaor, we've got 5 copies of a great new F Scott Fitzgerald collection to give away... “First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his ... Read More...

At The Dabbler we are blessed with the finest commenters on the internet. Jonathan Law’s comments are so deep, rich and insightful (and frankly he’s costing us a fortune in Glengoyne whisky) that we have  invited him to write his own feature. Notes in the Margin will be an irregular column ... Read More...

In the company of Anne Ward, author of the Nothing to See Here blog and book, we pay a visit to a huge pile of bones. The crypt of St Leonard’s Church in Hythe contains one of only two ossuaries in the UK (the other is in Rothwell, Northants). It holds ... Read More...

So how would Norbiton mark the passing of the Olympic flame? The Olympic flame is approaching, relayed from Cornwall like news of a shiny corporate rainbow armada; and the sight of it makes me impatient to reclaim the idea of procession for Norbiton. There are varieties of procession, of course – there ... Read More...

Not everything is getting worse, Nige admits. Our rivers have been transformed in recent years... Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, have to admit that in at least two respects life in England has unequivocally improved in the course of my lifetime. One is the range and quality of food available in ... 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...

The sorry inheritance of a certain young Korean. What would it be like to be told at age 27 that for the next four decades you were going to have to kill, starve and oppress millions of people if you wanted to stay alive? A strange question you may think, and ... Read More...

Pop this week, as Brit unleashes a quintet of songs in which everything is louder than everything else… One recent Sunday morning I caught the above song by Ren Harvieu on Radio 2 (Aled Jones’ programme, I often listen to it on the way to my weekly 5-a-side matches, his mix ... Read More...