He wrote animal stories of exquisite prose, yet Henry Williamson ended up as an overt, unapologetic Nazi. In this Dabbler classic, Jonathan Law looks at the good and the (alarmingly) bad sides of the author of Tarka the Otter... If we’re honest, most of us have at least one friend that we ... Read More...
Worth Repeating
Anyone who has suffered writer's block might take consolation from the life of John Ferrar Holms. Jonathan Law introduces perhaps the least productive 'writer' in the English language... A while ago on The Dabbler , Mark Pack wrote feelingly about the miseries of writers’ block – of self-doubt, procrastination, and hours spent ... Read More...
Nige admires the work of Charles Holden, the architect behind Southgate Tube Station, one of London's finest Art Deco Underground stations... That is not a newly landed art deco UFO above - it is Southgate Underground station, towards the end of the Cockfosters branch of the Piccadilly Line. I discovered this part of ... Read More...
From Wordsworth to Auden, a surprising number of famous poems have been blighted - or sometimes, improved - by printing errors, as Jonathan Law reveals... In a post a while back Frank Key gave us his startling revisionist take on a well-known poem by Sylvia Plath: In her mad poem ‘Daddy’, Sylvia Plath makes ... Read More...
In which Luke Honey of The Greasy Spoon revisits a West London institution redolent of the swinging sixties... Hands up who remembers The Gasworks? Twenty odd years ago, I started my glamorous career in the so-called Art World - as a porter at a well-known auctioneers to be found in the ... Read More...
August is the month when we run a few repeats on The Dabbler, before normal service resumes in September. However, so rich and vast are our archives now that it's no bad thing to give some of the oldies another airing. As a Bank Holiday treat, here's Mahlerman's piece about ... Read More...
In the autumn Jonathan Law will be returning with a major new series on a remarkable family of eccentrics. In the meantime, here's a rerun of his take on the underexplored literary topic of 'Cake imagery in the writings of Sylvia Plath'... On a damp afternoon one May, enraged cake-obsessive ‘ianf’ ... Read More...
Commenting on Frank Key's bedtime story about the glib hatter, Adelephant recommended the story of The Hobyahs as suitable follow-up reading matter. This remarkable folk story was collected in Joseph Jacobs' 1890 work 'English Fairy Tales'. I offer no analysis or comment - it really does speak for itself... Once there was ... Read More...
Should you want to visit the coast but stay indoors out of the sunshine why not take a trip to a seaside museum? Anne Ward, author of the Nothing to See Here blog and book, offers a suggestion. The Musgrave Collection in Eastbourne is a true one-off, just like its owner, ... Read More...
Daniel Kalder examines the phenomenon of otherwise intelligent people falling head-over-heels for murderous tyrants... Mussolini: you might think he was just a blustering fool in a fez, but once upon a time many people took him very seriously. I remember my shock when, aged 15 or so, I learned from my ... Read More...
