Continuing Frank's extraordinary series of very, very brief lives... Atholl Oakley, Sir Edward (British wrestler, writer, and organiser of “rugged holiday cruises”, 1900 – 1987). To build up his physique, Atholl Oakley followed a regimen devised by the giant wrestler Hackenschmitt, which involved drinking eleven pints of milk every day. Many ... Read More...
Month: September 2013
Cricket is a cruel game, and then you get too old to play it. So why do old cricketers keep going, despite it all? Jon Hotten explains... The end of the season is almost here, with its rain and with its retirements, with its shadows that fall longways across the ground ... Read More...
It's time the world recognised the man who made vintage wine, port and champagne possible, argues Henry... I’ve just written two articles, one on vintage port and one on cider. I found it impossible to write either without mentioning Sir Kenelm Digby. The amazing Digby was the inventor of a special ... Read More...
Nige recommends a lesser known novel by My Antonia author Willa Cather... A Lost Lady by Willa Cather [available for a penny from Amazon] is an apparently slight novel of some 160 pages that achieves the kind of depth and makes the kind of impact you'd expect from something twice the length. It's ... Read More...
From Wordsworth to Auden, a surprising number of famous poems have been blighted - or sometimes, improved - by printing errors, as Jonathan Law reveals... On a hazy day at the close of August Frank Key gave us his startling revisionist take on a well-known poem by Sylvia Plath: In her mad poem ... Read More...
As well as being a remarkably innovative composer, Ferruccio Busoni was a writer, arranger, editor, painter, linguist and intellectual. Was he, in fact, the last Renaissance Man?... When the itinerant clarinettist Ferdinando Busoni's wife Anna Weiss became pregnant in 1865, it was a measure of the instability and recklessness of ... Read More...
Nothing like tales of a lost island to get the imagination going. Today the Wikiworm's weekly delve into the strangest articles on Wikipedia uncovers the story of a Mediterranean island that was mistakenly attacked by American war planes... Ferdinandea is a submerged volcanic island which forms part of the underwater volcano ... Read More...
Following last week's startling (and succinct) biographies of, among others, John Lennon and Franz Schubert, Frank provides more exclusive extracts from his forthcoming reference work, a modern Brief Lives... Anderson, John Henry (British magician, 1814 – 1874). The first magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat, Anderson also did ... Read More...
Today we welcome the literary blogger Douglas Dalrymple to The Dabbler. In this first post Douglas recalls working in a low-life Seattle bookshop, with its collection of eccentric regulars including the actor Ethan Hawke, who never bought anything... In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable ... Read More...
Nige introduces Edward Gordon Craig, the prodigiously talented but now virtually forgotten stage designer, actor, artist, musician and womaniser... About this time last year I spent a couple of days in my favourite corner of Derbyshire, where, as usual, I called in on my favourite bookshop (The Bookshop in Wirksworth) and, ... Read More...
