Dabbler Showcase is a new feature aiming to promote contemporary visual art. Our first featured artist is the Liverpool-based photographer Andrew G Fisher... Bleak, ghostly British seaside resorts feature fairly regularly on The Dabbler, they're our sort of places. Canadian commenter extraordinaire Peter Burnet once remarked: Over here, we love beaches, but we know what ... Read More...

It's London Fashion week, voluptuous mutations and pilots who sound like Roger Moore for Susan this week... Perhaps you can help me? I am trying to think of a suitable caption for this photograph. Incidentally, the logo on the front of the man’s sweatshirt says ‘Dope Chef’. I love living in the swirling ... Read More...

At a quarter past one on Monday afternoon I descended into the crypt. The heavy door closed behind me and I was alone, facing a long pool of water in which the low grey-green ceiling arches were reflected to create an optical illusion of a tubular tunnel. In the middle ... Read More...

This week Mahlerman takes us on a journey into "a Teutonic soundworld to which few non-German singers posses a passport"... In early 19th Century Germany,  ownership of the universal domestic pianoforte expanded from Royalty and the landowning super-rich to embrace the new middle-classes; and in parallel with this expansion emerged just ... Read More...

In the true spirit of the Wikiworm Manifesto I decided this week to look into St Vitus' dance, which I had previously always thought to be a term for epilepsy. Turns out I was wrong again... St. Vitus' Dance was a social phenomenon that occurred in mainland Europe between the 14th ... Read More...

Jonathan Rendall was a gambler and boozer who died last month in grim circumstances. He was also one of the finest writers of his generation, says Jon Hotten... Jonathan Rendall has died at the age of 48, and as befits much of his life as a writer, the news of his passing ... Read More...

As Pope Benedict announces his retirement, Frank recalls Pius XII (Pontiff from 1939 to 1958), an expert in all matters who felt qualified to lecture TS Eliot on literature... So sudden and unexpected was Pope Benedict's abdication this week that I was caught on the hop and have not had time ... Read More...

The internet has revolutionised the lexicographer's ability to find authoritative information, says Jonathon Green. So why do so many still reject authority...? It is a truth universally acknowledged that the ever-expanding aggregation of digitized information that we shorthand as ‘the Net’ has changed the game. All the games. Being no doubt ... Read More...

In the first of a small series, London-based dabbler Luke Honey, maître d' of The Greasy Spoon Blog, resurrects a venerable cookery magazine, complete with a retro recipe that has long since fallen out of favour... Not that long ago I managed to save a complete set of the 1968 Cordon Bleu ... Read More...

Susan's been globe-trotting again... Arriving at the luggage reclaim in Cape Town, I couldn’t spot a single black face among the passengers from our plane. South Africa does seem to attract a certain type of tourist - less package tour, more ‘comfortably travelled.’  There’s an air of middle-England Middletonia about the ... Read More...