During August we give a few Dabbler classics some airplay. A scene from Gregory's Girl appeared in one of the Olympic opening ceremony montages so we thought it might be topical to spin this Retroprogressive post from August 2010... Post recession shoppers do not wish to appear ostentatious, so luxury designer ... Read More...

To the Olympic Park. All those good things you’ve heard about the games? I'm afraid they're all entirely true. My one disappointment was that the New Zealand women's hockey team didn't do the haka. But you can't really blame that on London 2012. *** I suppose the only thing that I really ... Read More...

To completely misappropriate Jack London -  "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." and, in the spirit of all things dabblerish, we went about setting up our Dabbler Book Club for the purposes of sharing inspiration and information with our fellow Dabblers. This ... 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... Before we leave the Baroque period, this episode looks at the violin, Vivaldi and the development of the solo concerto... This serialisation is an abridged version of the full ... Read More...

What does the flight of an arrow describe for us today? In my last post, speaking of horses, I concluded that we were losing a certain collective mental shape, and I now find the same to be true of the flight of an arrow. I was a spectator at the Olympic women’s ... Read More...

The traditional Dabbler summer break is upon us. It's one-a-day until September, and the chance to catch up with some terrific, even historic, posts from The Dabbler Archives. Today, here's one from a multi-talented friend of The Dabbler... As well as being the theatre critic for the Evening Standard and an ... Read More...

Can music describe anything more than music? This week we explore music that seeks to paint pictures. In his 1936 Autobiography, Igor Stravinsky famously intoned that music was "powerless to express anything at all" and throughout his long life he did not retreat far from this very personal view: "music expresses ... Read More...

To Poland, to one of those towns that has had at least a couple of names over the last hundred years, and more than one population. No matter how successful Poland becomes – and it is a very successful place – I wonder whether it will ever dispel the atmosphere ... Read More...

Rayner Heppenstall, the 'freelance reactionary', and the literary resonances of Deal Pier... Above is a photograph of the pier at Deal, on the coast of Kent. It is the last pier built in England, opened in 1954, replacing a derelict nineteenth-century predecessor. At its far end, it terminates in a large ... Read More...

This week, a slang lexicographer's delight: the autobiography of a 19th century villain that contains a goldmine of criminal language... Like its standard, literary equivalent, the literature of slang has its canon and its classics. I have mentioned some of the greats – Taylor the Water Poet, George Ade, Surtees, Wodehouse ... Read More...