The current Dabbler Book Club monthly choice is The Broken Road, the posthumously published third volume of the memoirs of the great adventurer and prose stylist Patrick Leigh Fermor. Here, Douglas Dalyrmple explains the author's enduring appeal... I’m deaf… That’s the awful truth. That’s why I’m leaning towards you in this ... Read More...
Month: September 2013
This week Mahlerman celebrates the great Gallic songwriters... Words; whatever happened to them in popular music? And why was I shocked a few moments ago, hearing the 'song' that is currently topping the charts? Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo has sold 160,000 copies in the last seven days. The second verse ... Read More...
This bugged me as a teenager, and now thanks to the wonders of Wikipedia, today's Wikiworm performs a valuable public service in answering that age old question - "What the hell is a pompatus?" The word pompatus, also spelled pompitous, is a neologism used in the lyrics of Steve Miller’s 1973 ... Read More...
Today Frank concludes his series for now...but never fear, Brief Lives will return next year! Atherton, Gertrude (American writer, 1857 – 1948). Atherton declined an invitation to meet Oscar Wilde, having been shown his photograph. “His mouth covered half his face, the most lascivious, coarse, repulsive mouth I had ever seen. ... Read More...
It has inspired countless cheesy posters and a few alarming records. But, finds Nige, the poem Desiderata is worth a second look... Born on this day in 1872 was the American writer and attorney Max Ehrmann, one of those cases - like Joseph Blanco White - of a writer remembered for just ... Read More...
Once claiming to be 'the seafood capital of the world', Crisfield is now virtually a ghost town. Rita reflects on time, place and crab sandwiches... It was a dark and starry night, a peaceful rural silence blanketing the sleeping fields … that is until the shots rang out. We were just ... Read More...
One of the best parts of running the Dabbler Book Club is when we receive reviews of the books we send out to our lucky winners each month. We were honoured to receive the following review of Nevil Shute's recently republished Trustee from the Toolroom from Dabbler Barbara, who has ... Read More...
There is a new monkey at the zoo. It’s a drill – like a baboon with a gorilla’s face – and it has usurped the spider monkeys in the first enclosure at Bristol Zoo. I don’t miss the spider monkeys, I was never on nodding terms with them and they ... Read More...
Continuing our fortnightly poetry feature, Stephen Pentz takes the train... It is a commonplace that travelling by train is more conducive to observation and to contemplation than travelling by, say, car or airplane. Not surprisingly, therefore, a great store of poetry exists that has its origins in someone gazing out of ... Read More...
When I stumbled across this Wikipedia article I though this sounds like a brilliant idea! Who wants to join? The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to bring about the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT was founded in ... Read More...