How far can you travel on a sofa? I’ve been working on and off for a number of years in the world of sofas, God forgive me. So I was surprised I hadn’t heard of the “sofa poem by Seamus Heaney” that a colleague referred to the other day. She was ... Read More...
Month: August 2014
The world's most succinct word? I can think of some others that are possibly more succinct, but they're not printable on a family publication like The Dabbler... The word Mamihlapinatapai is derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one ... Read More...
This week, an original play based on real-life events... [Dramatis Personae:] ROBERT FRIPP, modest and bashful egghead electric guitar wizard TOYAH WILCOX, pint-sized popstrel, his wife PATRICIA FRIPP, executive skills coach and motivational speaker, his sister PETE SINFIELD, magician who weaves spells with words, King Crimson lyricist Scene One. Toyah’s so-called “Yoko House”, a property devoted ... Read More...
Jonathon Green takes a trip to the 'specialist' bookshops of The Backside of St Clements... All gone now. What you’re looking at above is the Australian High Commission (though didn’t that get knocked down too a year ago or so?). Like Fred and Rose’s lair at 25 Cromwell Street, Holywell Street had ... Read More...
Rita discovers that the town where she used to work has been voted the second snobbiest in America... The dog days of summer are traditionally silly season for the news media here as soaring temperatures drive political discourse into the stratosphere of the absurd and inspire heat-stressed Americans to act out ... Read More...
Nige salutes the extraordinary lit-crit of Christopher Ricks... Despite the heat having knocked out most of the thinking parts of my brain, I've been reading (technically re-reading, as I read it when it came out some 40 - 40! - years ago) Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment. It presents the poet's ... Read More...
Steerforth discovers a once-popular but now largely forgotten thriller writer with a unique way with words... The truth is that even the most experienced and well-qualified second-hand booksellers know bugger all about most of the titles that we sell. Much of the time, we are not selling Eliot (George or T. ... Read More...
Mahlerman selects three fine works by composers who died 'in service'... Emerging, as I did the other day, from the subterranean depths of the tube into the bright sunlight of Tooting Broadway I was greeted by the familiar beauty of Franz Schubert's imperishable masterpiece, Deutsch number 759, the Symphony No 8 ... Read More...
Were the Dark Ages all just a bit of made up fun? Find out more with today's weird wikipedia article, courtesy of The Wikiworm... The phantom time hypothesis is a revisionist history and conspiracy theory developed in the 1980s and '90s by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß, Germany). The hypothesis proposes that periods of history, specifically that of ... Read More...
What everyone from Hippocrates to Shakespeare said about swoons, shudders, convulsions and dread... Hargrave Jennings (c.1817-1890) was an English Rosicrucian, occultist, and writer on comparative religion, whose day job was acting as secretary to an opera manager called Colonel Mapleson. Among his works were Sermons From The Styx (1886), puportedly a ... Read More...
