Il pleut. I must resort to French; ‘it is raining’ is too drably familiar to describe February’s pluvial onslaught. I need words of one syllable; words that can be spat; words at one remove, sufficiently alien for the deluge that has amphibianised our villages, turned our lowlands into swamplands and ... Read More...

Sergei Prokofiev may have been a second-rate human being, but he was also a genius, argues Mahlerman... Call me old-fashioned, but my broad touchstone for genius is that a man (it is almost always a man) elevated to such a station in life should, at the very least have spent five ... Read More...

We've featured mention of Edward Bulwer-Lytton here on The Dabbler before - and here he is again, courtesy of an unusual wikipedia article about an even more unusual writing competition... The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest takes place annually and is sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University in San Jose, ... Read More...

Imagine you are a nocturnal traveller, lost, with only a map of the stars. You look from map to sky to map to sky to map to sky and try to correlate the two... The sky at night is darker than the sky during the day. You probably know why this ... Read More...

Terry Stiastny, a new John Murray author, on a visit to her publisher's historic home... Daylight falls into a below-stairs office at 50 Albemarle Street from an elaborate glass rotunda above. The rotunda has a strange quality: if you stand beneath the highest point of the dome and speak, you hear ... Read More...

Douglas Dalrymple on Before Philosophy, Black Elk and Catholicism... My paternal grandfather’s sympathies were evenly split, I think, between cowboys and Indians. When he died, my grandmother begged me to take a few items from his closet. I kept a button-up cowboy shirt with a nighttime western scene stitched on the ... Read More...

Today on The Dabbler we feature an interview with Susan Bordo, author of last month's Dabbler Book Club choice, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, the popular new historical biography that seeks the true story behind the Tudor’s most notorious queen… Hi, Susan; I'd like to begin by asking what your original ... Read More...

Steerforth lifts the lid on Gerry Anderson's worst idea - an unintentionally grotesque show so awful that it traumatised a generation despite never even making it onto television... In 1966, at the height of his powers, "supermarionation" creator Gerry Anderson came up with a bold concept for a new television series. He ... Read More...

"Eternity Is Not Length Of Life But Depth Of Life" - how a line on a child's grave haunted the poet Charlotte Mew... Charlotte Mew, like any self-respecting Victorian poet, wrote her share of graveyard poems. Although I think of Mew as a modern poet, her life (she was born in ... Read More...

Just why did Britain's favourite alcoholic spy decide to conspicuously mangle his drinks? Wikipedia has the (sort-of) answer... "Shaken, not stirred" is a well-known catchphrase of fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond, regarding his preference for how he wished his martini prepared.  It was first uttered by Sean Connery in ... Read More...