Worm sets off into the wilderness to review 'Cabins', a stunning new photographic book published by TASCHEN… I'm slightly embarrassed to say this in public, but I must confess to being something of a Grand Designs addict. My little addiction enables me to re-watch every episode again and again, despite being repulsed by ... Read More...
Year: 2014
Resuming our 1p Book Review feature, guest contributor and longtime Dabbler reader Joey Denham recommends a recent anti-western novel... Occasionally I’ll pick up a book because of its cover. It’s only natural. I did this a few years ago with Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (2011), and again later with The Flame Alphabet (2012) by ... Read More...
In the penultimate part of our serialisation of The Whartons of Winchendon, Jonathan Law addresses the question: 'Just how mad was Goodwin Wharton?' ... Although the Glorious Revolution made the Wharton family one of the great powers in the land, the new regime was at first slow to recognize the merits of Goodwin – ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple remembers his great-grandmother... Mary Irene and I used to hunt snakes in the fields behind her house. By July the mustard flowers and tumbleweeds had dried up and blown away to uncover the little holes where I imagined that snakes plotted and hid. Playing the chivalrous protector, I would ... Read More...
Willie Walton may have been slothful, diffident and a womaniser - but, as Mahlerman reveals, 'melody poured out of him'... Regular readers of Lazy Sunday (I probably have at least three) may remember that in a recent survey of the life of Sergei Prokofiev, an unavoidable conclusion was established: that he ... Read More...
What if Africa had sent the first humans into space? To Infinity and beyond, as we head out into the weirder parts of the Wikipedia universe with the Wikiworm... Edward Festus Makuka Nkoloso was a resident of Zambia who joined the British forces in World War II, and served as a sergeant in the signal corps. ... Read More...
Frank is handing over responsibility for his correspondence to an 18th century chap called Patridge (or possibly Partridge - there's a fair chance he misspelled his own name)... I regularly receive letters from readers, both of The Dabbler and of my own Hooting Yard blog, imploring me to offer advice on ... Read More...
Vandals come in all shapes and sizes, and their targets and their reasons can be hard to fathom... Last year, when reading about Art Under Attack - a Tate Britain exhibition of pieces that have been deliberately damaged over the years by iconoclasts of one kind and another - I was startled ... Read More...
Bookseller Steerforth handles a great many old books in his line of work. Often he'll find old photos and albums amongst the piles of mildewed tomes: snapshots of lost worlds and forgotten lives. Continuing the series in which he shares some of the more interesting discoveries, here are more of the incredible ... Read More...
Continuing our 10-part weekly serialisation of Jonathan Law's The Whartons of Winchendon... As we saw last week, Goodwin Wharton was able to communicate with the fairies. But that was merely a warm-up, as before long he was receiving messages direct from God, with bizarre consequences... It was in the October of 1684 ... Read More...
