Do you ever feel oppressed by the grinding circularity of the week? I mean the relentless Mondaytuesdaywednesdayness of it. Snags you at the age of four and it’s got you forever, with only a little time off at Christmas when there is a disorienting flurry of bank holidays and you ... Read More...

Following his post on October leaves, this week Stephen approaches autumn from a more oblique angle... Autumn is not autumn without a visit to Wallace Stevens.  I do not know exactly what the following poem "means."  Perhaps it has something to do with autumn being both an end and a beginning, ... Read More...

Today's unusual wikipedia article is a complex tale - and as a commited arithmophobe, this is all greek to me... The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most famous attempts to establish mathematical truth by ... Read More...

All of us at The Dabbler were very sad to hear today of the death of Norman Geras (25 August 1943 - 18 October 2013) - political theorist, voracious reader and prolific blogger. Norm was a friend of and help to The Dabbler in its early days. By way of a ... Read More...

Readers of a milksop disposition, look away now! From the archives, Frank once again besmirches the pages of The Dabbler with pure unbridled filth... According to John Trevelyan in What The Censor Saw (1973), the following list includes some of the disgusting and morally repugnant subjects rightly banned by the British Board of Film ... Read More...

Last month's Dabbler book Club choice was blockbuster The Kills by Richard House. Worm gives us his review on one of the most talked about books of the summer... Longlisted for the Man Booker prize this year, The Kills is an upmarket thriller that drops you into a topical story involving the ... Read More...

As America shuts down, Rita dreams a dream... I travelled to the nation’s capital recently and found it a much changed city.  Streets usually thronged with government workers were deserted, museums shuttered, great monuments to the founders and the fallen barricaded with closed signs.  Portents of the end times abounded – ... Read More...

A few years ago bookseller Steerforth came across a remarkable diary, which he began to publish on his blog and which we now serialise on The Dabbler. In the opening instalment Steerforth introduced Derek, a local government officer, married to Brenda, with three daughters and a teenage son Richard. Later ... Read More...

There's some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, as Bertie Wooster memorably put it. And none have pulled rawer work than the Reverend Ralph Tollemache when it came to his own children... In the records of the more or less illustrious dead, there are many who are ... Read More...

Mahlerman is away this week, but this terrific post from his archive shows that losing an arm need not mean the end of a pianist's career... When Paul Wittgenstein woke up in a Russian field hospital in 1914 he was missing his right arm and was effectively a prisoner of war. ... Read More...