Capitalism for and against. There's a lot of it about, mostly against. But, this thing 'capitalism' - it doesn't really describe anything in particular, does it? Capitalism, at its most basic, is an arrangement where there are property rights and market relations governed, to some degree of effectiveness, by the rule ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Bill
Of course, now that all the other home nations have been knocked out of the Rugby World Cup, we Brits and Irish are all Welsh as far as rugby's concerned. It therefore behoves all of you out there to learn more about the unpredictable opposition we'll be facing in Saturday's semi-final... Wales's defence coach, ... Read More...
As the Rugby World Cup hots up Gaw considers why Wales backs youth and admires craftiness. This Saturday Wales play Ireland in one of the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals and look an exciting prospect. The credit for how they're playing is going to a talented group of young players: Teenage wing George North, fly-half ... Read More...
This week we examine an inspired if actually quite strange mingling of cultures. Was the adoption of American soul music by white, working-class British youths one of the strangest things to happen last century? We're used to this sort of thing now. But I'm not sure anyone would have imagined it ... Read More...
The Poster King, the marvellous Edward McKnight Kauffer exhibition at The Estorick Collection, provokes some thoughts on the advertising of today. The idea that advertising can be art became entirely uncontroversial, or at least it seemed to me, around about the time of the Guinness Surfer ad. But one wonders whether you could make ... Read More...
Continuing our Dabbler Verse series, Gaw recalls a horsey and hippyish poem from his youth. Coming back from the corner shop today I heard the leisurely clatter of hooves. It was the mounted police that regularly patrol our corner of London. I always get a thrill when I see them. They ... Read More...
Unfashionably British Gaw takes issue with a Great Living Englishman. Jeremy Paxman in Saturday's Guardian (he has a TV series on the British Empire coming out this autumn): ..."Britishness" was forged through war, industrial expansion and, absolutely crucially, the building of an empire. With the empire gone and the United Kingdom a part of the ... Read More...
My father-in-law is a photographer, and one of the great things about 'have camera, will travel' is that he occasionally gets to go on some fantastic trips. A while ago he was invited to visit the Eastern Orthodox St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai Desert of Egypt by a friend who's ... Read More...
It may be a cliché but that doesn't mean it's not true - the French really are sexier than us. Or so believes Gaw in the wake of a holiday revelation. A Good Year is a 2006 film starring Russell Crowe as a banker who inherits a wine-making estate in Provence. ... Read More...
Dabbler editor Gaw ponders the ever-changing character of parts of London... I'm reading Iain Sinclair's book Hackney: That Red Rose Empire and something said by one of his interviewees seemed to encapsulate the social character of many of those parts of London which suffered in the recent turmoil, areas which are difficult to ... Read More...
