Nige discovers 'a true giant among comic characters'... Having enjoyed and admired Masters of Atlantis so much, I've been reading another of Charles Portis's novels - The Dog Of The South (available for 1p from Amazon). This is the story of one Ray Midge, who takes off on a long and eventful ... Read More...

Was there really a Golden Age of pop music? Yes, argues Brit. It was circa 1950 (or possibly earlier) to the present day... Three weeks ago Mahlerman asked whether classical music was dead. Interestingly, people ask the same question about pop music with far more frequency and surely much less reason. In ... Read More...

Join us on Worm's weekly foray into the more unusual corners of Wikipedia, this week going in search of some sadly overlooked polar explorers... The Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897 was an ill-fated Swedish effort to reach the North Pole in which all three expedition members perished. Salomon Andrée, the first ... Read More...

The borders are open and the Bulgarians are coming - so here's some appropriate literature... I am suffering from a spiritual malaise. I am soul sick. I have not eaten any breakfast. I need to darn a hole in the sleeve of my jumper, but I have no further wool that ... Read More...

Nuffle your clod! Jonathon Green takes us back to the 1830s, and the luridly melodramatic Newgate Novels that were the precursors of the 'penny-dreadfuls'... In a box of the stone jug I was born, Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn, And my father, as I've heard say, Was a merchant of capers gay, Who ... Read More...

Rita weighs into the gun debate, and finds an unlikely hero in Piers Morgan... Well, I’m going to bite the bullet and write about guns, a topic that leaves me feeling trapped in a Hall of Mirrors where everywhere you turn you see a distorted, nightmarish vision of America.  But this ... Read More...

This week Susan faces the dentist's drill and observes some Olympian sell-outs... What sort of a person becomes a dentist? I was pondering on this, whilst my hands gripped tighter and tighter around the arms of the dentist’s chair (the only other time I do this is when a plane takes ... Read More...

An old university friend once told me of an unusual habit his grandfather (an otherwise outwardly ordinary man) had when sitting down to Sunday lunch. If there was pork crackling in the offing, he would take a decent length of it, recline in his chair with head thrust back and, ... Read More...

With the Grammy Awards imminent, Mahlerman casts his eye over the nominees and identifies the gems amid the dross... Next Sunday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles the Rapper LL Cool J will host the 55th Grammy Awards, the annual bean feast set-up in 1959 by the National Academy of ... Read More...

This list of perfect rhymes might come in handy next time you need to complete a limerick... Perfect rhymes, which are also called exact, full, or true rhymes, occur when two words sound absolutely identical from the point in which each word's stressed vowel occurs to the end of the word. Also, ... Read More...