The first of a two-part meditation on the mostly morbid music of a marvellous miserabilist. Although he may not have racked up the body count of a Nick Cave or Johnny Cash, the late Lou Reed sang about death more often than many a popular musician. Indeed, he did it often ... Read More...
Year: 2013
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. If you're new to Derek, you can catch up with the previous instalments here. This week, the winter and Christmas of 1984... Today's extracts ... Read More...
Never mind the ad campaigns, M&S is still great for food and booze, says wine correspondent Henry... We should have guessed that Marks & Spencer was in trouble again from their recent advertising campaign. One can imagine desperate executives at head office shouting: ‘dammit John! We’ve got Mirren, Westwood and Twiggy, ... Read More...
This week, Mahlerman's guide to classical music in America... When the Scottish philanthopist Andrew Carnegie built the hall that carries his name on Seventh Avenue, New York City, it was constructed in brownstone masonry - rare enough, when you consider that most of the large buildings around it are steel framed, ... Read More...
Perhaps Boris Johnson could press today's weird wikipedia discovery into action as the new Thames estuary airport? Project Habakkuk was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete (a mixture of wood pulp and ice), for use against German U-boats in the ... Read More...
The Ancient Egyptians really weren't very bright, argues Frank... Two things serve to persuade me that the Ancient Egyptians were a peculiarly dim-witted rabble. There is a tendency to regard the great civilisations of the past through rose-tinted spectacles. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, writing of “the glory that was Greece ... Read More...
Time for the second installment on the curiosities of our capital city from Peter Watts - journalist,self-confessed London geek, and author of Know London. Streets beneath streets, layer upon layer, we descend into history... Paul, the librarian at Time Out, first told me about the street beneath Charing Cross Road in ... Read More...
Never, ever buy anything from Amazon unless Dr M von Vogelhausen has reviewed it first... Fellowes P-58C Cross Cut Shredder with SafeSense Technology ***** a discerning shredder Well, this is a remarkable little guy. I have lots of documents and paper that I need to destroy irrevocably, and for decades I have relied ... Read More...
The biography of the austere and forbidding poet R.S. Thomas is a hoot, reveals Nige... It's not often a biography has me laughing out loud - let alone in the Introduction. But so it was with Byron Rogers' The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, which ... Read More...
Mr Ferman’s office was on the ground floor of a tall Victorian townhouse near to the centre of Exeter. There was no buzzer so I knocked on the door. ‘Come in,’ said somebody, and I entered a giant heap of files with a few walkways cut through it. I have ... Read More...