The true story behind the famous poem by Robert Browning... Good evening. My name is Guus. If I may, I will tell you an anecdote. I am an ancient and somewhat crumbling gent, and it might be thought that I would have a veritable storehouse of anecdotage to draw upon, but ... Read More...
Key’s Cupboard
The mind of Frank Key
You will be familiar with the slow food movement, particularly if you are a Guardian reader living in an ecotown. Less high profile, but more amenable to the Dabbler demographic, is slow botany. So I am going to tell you all about it... Slow botany developed as a reaction against all ... Read More...
The cruelties of Ancient Rome's circuses give Frank an idea for an exciting new movie starring Russell Crowe... One of the combat sports which thrilled the crowds in the circuses of Ancient Rome was the pitting of blind men against ostriches. A savage and ugly spectacle, no doubt, and one quite ... Read More...
Guns or butter? Butter or guns? It really is as simple as that. Which would you choose?... I have been watching, with something akin to hysterical overexcitement, reruns of the long-running television game show Guns Before Butter. It really is the most fantastic example of Bismarckian light entertainment ever devised. As ... Read More...
Polar bears might look cuddly but in fact they are very dangerous creatures. Here, Frank reveals a top tip for keeping safe when dealing with them... You might, in the unimaginably harsh gale-swept subzero temperatures in the frozen hell of the polar wastes, become peckish, particularly if your picnic hamper fell ... Read More...
In a piece of original semi-fiction, Frank Key reveals what happened when prolific pamphleteer Dobson took it upon himself to try his luck with a commercial publishing house... The vast majority of Dobson’s pamphlets were self-published, printed on a Gestetner machine in the garden shed by Marigold Chew, the bindings stitched ... Read More...
Frank unearths firsthand accounts of one of the most ridiculous paranormal experiments in the history of ghosthunting... Harry Price (1881-1948) was the most celebrated, and certainly the most energetic, English ghost-hunter of the last century. His name pops up somewhere in virtually every account of paranormal phenomena from the 1920s until ... Read More...
As well as the usual diamonds and whatnot, Princess Anne received hundreds of wedding gifts from ordinary members of the public, many of them ludicrous and possibly insulting. See part 1 of the list here, and here's part 2... Here is a further selection from the list of gifts received by ... Read More...
As well as the usual tiaras, diamonds and whatnot, Princess Anne received hundreds of gifts from ordinary members of the public. These included novelty handcuffs, some 'futuristic crayon pictures', a biro, to mention just a few of the best ones... I've always liked a bloody good list, which is presumably why ... Read More...
Frank reveals the story behind The Heft of Dough, the notorious concept album made by the power pop combo Agnetha and Anna-Frid and Benny and Bjorn and Dot Tint... The Heft Of Dough is the title of an LP recorded towards the end of the last century by Agnetha and Anna-Frid ... Read More...