Sadly not a story about football supporters meeting their maker, but instead a bizarre superstition from South Korea in this week's trawl through the weirdest articles on Wikipedia... Fan death is a a widely believed urban legend in South Korea. Despite there being no scientifically verified cases, the phenomenon posits that sleeping in ... Read More...
Year: 2013
Frank pays tribute to one of the great, and quite bonkers, prose stylists... If Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926) is remembered at all today, it is as the author of Travels In Arabia Deserta, a classic account of his wanderings in northern Arabia, published in 1888. One hesitates to call it influential, for ... Read More...
We're delighted to welcome Dabbler legend Jonathon Green back to the site, with the first in an occasional series of reviews of current non-fiction... Geography Of The Marvellous Chet van Duzer - Sea Monsters on Medieval & Renaissance Maps 128 pp. British Library £20 This great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, ... Read More...
Peter Watts is a journalist who has worked in the national media since 1993, starting at The Sunday Times as a 17-year-old sportswriter. He has also been features writer at Time Out, where he edited the Big Smoke section. Peter now writes about architecture, politics, cinema, drugs, beer, history, music, museums, comedy, football, hippies, archeology, ... 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. If you're new to Derek, you can catch up with the first two instalments here. Later we get an extraordinary narrative and some ... Read More...
There was so much to admire about Fanny Cradock. And then it all went wrong... I can’t quite make up my mind about Fanny Cradock. I’m on the fence about this one. There are many things to admire: the innovative cookery programmes, the slick, ball-gowned cookery demonstrations presented to packed audiences ... Read More...
In this week's music column, Mahlerman dabbles in mysticism... Dreamers dream and, asleep or awake, we all dream. Mystics are an altogether more specific group who gather around a belief system of incandescent intensity; mysticism is at the very centre of their lives, and this is probably explained by the fact ... Read More...
Today's rummage through the weirdest articles on wikipedia brings an eye-watering tale to light - this is certainly one way to curry favour with your boss, not one i'd recommend though... Gang Bing was a Chinese general and eunuch who served under Emperor Yongle of the Ming Dynasty.General Gang Bing is ... Read More...
With the free press currently under threat from Leveson and Hacked Off, it's worth reminding ourselves of the proud history of British newspapers in fearlessly bringing us the important stories of the day... My friend Peter was browsing through the papers the other day and felt compelled to bring some of ... Read More...
All readers are familiar with the distinctive branding of Penguin paperbacks, and there can be few Dabblers who don't have at least half a dozen or so on their bookshelves. Karyn Reeves, however, has about 2,000 of them - and she reviews them on a weekly basis on her blog ... Read More...
