Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, The Dabbler is serialising Richard Fawkes' award-winning The History of Classical Music, read by Robert Powell... This third episode takes in the Renaissance period and the High Renaissance in England, and features music from Palestrina, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd [above].... This serialisation ... Read More...
Month: July 2012
Jonathan Law reveals John Ruskin's mania for mucking about with water, and explains how it stood as an emblem for his wish to tame the “frantic monster” of unchecked capitalism... Richard Nixon loved mashing potatoes; Gladstone had a passion for chopping down trees; and John Ruskin – in many ways a ... Read More...
With the East End about to host the Olympic Games, Neil Fraser's new book Over the Border: The Other East End tells the story of this overlooked but in fact vitally important area of London. In an exclusive guest post for The Dabbler, the author looks at what 'legacy' - ... Read More...
Nige presents a mini-anthology: Hill on Rain... For obvious reasons, this 'summer' my mind turned to the poetry of rain - and thereby to Geoffrey Hill. Our Greatest Living Poet is a veritable laureate of rain. Rain is his res, his thing; no one writes better about English rain in its ... Read More...
Last week's post featuring the classically awful Dracula AD 1972 has inspired some fond bad movie reminiscences. Well, mostly fond... One of the stranger aspects of human nature is our capacity to take delight in things that are awful. For instance, in my late teens I embarked upon an intense study ... Read More...
For the first time in history, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. Elberry reviews 'the ultimate guidebook to our urban centres'... From the sky, England still looks green. On the ground, it's another story, all cancerous conurbations and serial ghettos. Most people ... Read More...
Builders have come, so Mrs Brit and the girls fled the house. The builders are of course very mannish men. Gnarly men. Practical men, who work with their hands and communicate in grunts and obscenities and take at least two sugars in their tea. Like all good building crews this ... Read More...
Few pop songs can bear too much reality when it comes to sexual politics. Here are four that tell it like it is... Boy meets girl, is happy. Boy loses girl, is sad. And reverse the genders. With those four plots you’ve covered most pop, which as a genre doesn’t tend ... Read More...
Following Frank Key’s post earlier this week, you may be interested to hear about Tom Hicks, the Olympic Marathon champion of the 1904 St Louis Olympic Games. Having been helped by his trainers into the stadium (see above), Hicks collapsed on the finishing line and the medal ceremony was delayed ... Read More...
Nige enjoys a flawed but enthralling masterpiece by an 'almost wilfully obscure' author... It's not often I come across a novel that I can truly say is like no other I've ever read - but The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is one such book. An old friend has been recommending it ... Read More...
