Here's your chance to get involved with the Olympics! Why not join Frank in feeding strychnine to the marathon-runners?... Well, it took a seemingly endless series of lengthy phonecalls with Seb, but I am delighted to announce that I have won my Olympic contract. The company I set up, Key Marathon ... Read More...

In which Mr Slang takes stroll through Great Wen, calls for Armageddon... Some Lord’s day. I know not which and care less for I have no time for man-made jacks-in-boxes and believe but in a single rule: that after A comes B and thence to C and thus is the tale ... Read More...

Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, The Dabbler is serialising Richard Fawkes' award-winning The History of Classical Music, read by Robert Powell... In this second episode, Fawkes looks at the Gothic Age, the Motet and the Troubadour tradition.... This serialisation is an abridged version of the full audiobook, which you can ... Read More...

Should you want to visit the coast but stay indoors out of the sunshine why not take a trip to a seaside museum? Anne Ward, author of the Nothing to See Here blog and book, offers a suggestion. The Musgrave Collection in Eastbourne is a true one-off, just like its owner, 94 year old George ... Read More...

Rita experiences at first-hand the freak storm that has brought devastation to Washington DC... The voice on the radio spoke with a heavy Indian accent.  He was calling in to "The Talk Back" line, a feature on Washington D. C. station WTOP that invites listeners to call and vent their frustrations ... Read More...

Remembering the dead is easy when they're part of the furniture... In the room of quattrocento sculpture in the Louvre, lined up with the portrait busts of Filippo Strozzi and Dietisalvi Neroni and the rest, there is an odd relic of Florentine interior design: a terracotta death mask of a woman ... Read More...

Every month we award a bottle of Glengoyne 10 year old single malt - the finest whisky available to humanity – to a commenter who tickles our fancy… It was a great month for comments, if not sunshine. How else are you going to ventilate your opinions when stuck indoors? There were some ... Read More...

Kensington Gore: Luke Honey takes us on a trip around some London landmarks captured on film and uncovers some strange and groovy goings on down the King's Road... I first noticed him one Saturday morning; about a week or so after moving into my new house in Battersea: a man with ... Read More...

To Legoland, near Windsor, with three young children and a baby in tow, and only five adults to manage them (which is at least seven too few). Remarkable thing, memory. As soon as something is over, we immediately begin the process of mentally editing out the rain, the crowds, the ... Read More...

Mahlerman marvels at the remarkable, racy and musically-significant shenanigans of Mrs Mahler... Reading, as I have been, the surviving letters of Gustav Mahler to his frisky (to put it mildly) wife Alma, I'm not sure I can answer my own question. Her apparent need to be economical with the truth dated ... Read More...