From Nazi Germany to 9/11, Jonathon Green explains why true believers don't use slang... ‘Before [the Al Qaeda training camp] they were joking around and using slang. After the camp the guys were talking jihad, praying and quoting the Koran.’ British jihadist, quoted in Jason Burke The 9/11 Wars (2011) Humankind, as ... Read More...
Month: June 2013
Top ad man and author Ben Kay graced these pages back in 2011 with a personal insight into the world of a blockbuster fiction writer. Via his brilliant ad-industry blog 'If This is a Blog Then What's Christmas?' he brings us up to date with the process of creating his ... Read More...
The great 'Beau' Brummell was the man who applied himself as none before to the reform and perfection of masculine dress... As Max Beerbohm puts it in his essay on Dandyism, 'So to clothe the body that its fineness be revealed and its meanness veiled has been the aesthetic aim of ... Read More...
Jon Hotten discovers that Australian cricket legend Jeff Thomson - one of the most dangerous fast bowlers of all time - still knows the right way to tell a story... It was a few hours after David Warner had taken a swing at Joe Root in a Birmingham bar, and Jeff ... Read More...
There was more to Henry VIII than head-chopping and monastery-bashing... Bloody Tudors everywhere at the moment. I've been reading Hilary Mantel, watching BBC Two’s Tudor season, and now I can’t get this song out of my head. ‘I’m 'Enery the Eighth I am’, Joe Brown claims in a tale about a ... Read More...
Perhaps the more sporty Dabblers will have already heard of this naughty footballing fellow? I wonder whether this type of caper could still possibly happen in this day and age of the internet? Ali Dia was a footballer who played one game for the English FA Premier League club Southampton in ... Read More...
Frank reveals the exciting pastimes of the good and the great... We know that, as a child, John Ruskin took great pleasure in digging holes and – a special treat! - jumping off his favourite box to land on the floor. And we know that James Boswell, immediately on waking, liked to ... Read More...
Mr Slang is away this week, but this corker from the archives explains why he finds one particular word to be the most offensive in the English language... Occasionally, when I toss some new offering onto the great heap of the unsold that is publishing (for if every birth is a ... Read More...
Rita marks the Queen's 60th coronation anniversary with an extraordinary confession involving an old-fashioned loo, a taste for lead, and Her Majesty's nose... The most irritating thing about being a Brit in America is the expectation that I must be as enamored of the Royal family as Americans are. Except in the ... Read More...
From rearing horses to hungry sparrows - the provocations delivered to the world's dictators by members of the animal kingdom. The US comedian WC Fields famously said never to work with animals and children. I suspect President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan may have been thinking something similar earlier this year, when ... Read More...
