Dabblers ahoy! A special exhibition dedicated to the work of the late, great Frank Key will be held at the Menier Gallery in London next month. The exhibit runs from Tuesday March 10 to Saturday March 14. On Tuesday 10th there will be a reception from 6 - 9 pm, where you ... Read More...
Some cheering news! Nigel Andrew - aka our very own Nige of Nigeness - has written a beautiful, fascinating and highly original book... The Mother of Beauty about English parish churches - more specifically, the undervalued national treasure that is the vast and scattered collection of 17th Century church monuments. English churches ... Read More...
The inestimable Mr Frank Key - also known as Paul Byrne - died last week. There really was nobody like him, was there? Frank was the first regular columnist we recruited, and Key’s Cupboard ran every Friday, more or less without fail, from August 2010 to February 2016. Those years were, without any ... Read More...
Some sad news. John Jobling - aka the wonderful Malty - died in September. Malty was a prolific commenter on The Dabbler and its satellite blogs and there was no one quite like him. Actually, there was nobody remotely like him. Who can forget his idiosyncratic lexicon, peppered with unexpected Teutonisms ... Read More...
Brit reviews the second novel by Terry Stiastny (an occasional Dabbler), and finds it a subtle, ingeniously-crafted tale of betrayal and comeuppance... Terry Stiastny’s debut novel Acts of Omission - which won the 2014 Paddy Power Political Novel of the Year (and was reviewed on The Dabbler here) - established the ... Read More...
A master of vicious social satire, E. F. Benson was just one member of a powerhouse Victorian literary family that is now all but forgotten. But his Mapp and Lucia novels are immortal... This article by Andrew Nixon (aka Dabbler founder 'Brit') first appeared in Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, ... Read More...
Looking back on the glory days of the English barrister, once followed like today's pop stars and footballers... John Osborne in his autobiography notes of his grandfather: Like so many people at that time [the inter-war period] he took as much interest in law-court proceedings as people do nowadays in football or ... Read More...
There's something of a panic underway about 'Post-Truth'. But it seems truth ended up as a casualty in some of the earliest - and most glorious - battles of modern democracy. Yesterday, the Observer reviewed no fewer than three books whose titles begin 'Post-Truth'. Nick Cohen's review blames the 'crisis' on ... Read More...
Brit reviews the superb new 'anti-cookbook' from the mighty Jonathan Meades... The first thing I do with a cookbook is have a quick flick through to assess how effortful is the gist. On opening The Plagiarist in the Kitchen I found: To kill an eel you need a brick and a concrete surface. ... Read More...
Nige reviews a handy new guidebook... The publishers Plexus, perhaps emboldened by my unearned reputation as ‘Cravat Wearer of the Year’, sent me a copy of this handsomely produced little volume to see if I might be interested in it. Of course I was. Manly Manners for the Impeccable Gent is a ... Read More...