Having recommended the remarkable novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page in our 1p Book Review feature, Nige enjoys the story of its mysterious author in a new biography...It’s a great story: a young art student comes across an elderly man who is living a reclusive life in a seaside town. ... Read More...
Biography
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into an area just off Bethnal Green Road known as the "worst street in London"... So which was the worst street in London? Marked in the most stygian black (‘lowest class...occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’) on Charles Booth’s ... Read More...
As a couple more Labour leadership contenders drop off the greasy pole, Terry Stiastny, author of political thriller Acts of Omission, disinters a blisteringly cynical fictional account of the political life, and wonders why they bother in the first place. It was so comfortable to be out of the race. Then again, he ... Read More...
Exclusively for The Dabbler, here is a glorious extract from Jonathan Meades' new memoir An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Sign up to the free Book Club at the bottom of the piece for a chance to win a copy... Dabbler editor Brit recently described 'An Encyclopaedia of Myself' as having a 'perfect ... Read More...
ZMKC recommends the often hilarious memoirs of Deborah, Duchess of Deveonshire and youngest of the notorious Mitford sisters... Wait for Me!, the autobiography of Deborah Devonshire, is worth at least 1p for its first section alone. This part of the book – an account of the author’s childhood surrounded by a ... Read More...
Michael ‘Peter Simple’ Wharton’s The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil can be bought for a penny in a single volume, but, as Brit writes, it’s very much an autobiography of two halves... The Missing Will is a hoot, covering with deadpan wit Wharton’s childhood in 1920s Yorkshire, his remarkably indolent, drunken Oxford ... Read More...
The more Nige reads of Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf in this excellent group biography, the more appalling they seem... The biography business - driven by modern research and documentation methods, publishers' demand for fat volumes, and the ever-grinding mills of Academe - does have a tendency to ... Read More...
Elberry reads an illuminating biography of a 'cocky, mordant, determined' playwright... Ben Jonson had the misfortune to be a late 16th Century English playwright. Who would read one of Jonson's diligently allegorical plays if he could read Hamlet or King Lear? Certainly, at first glance Jonson seems a lumbering, uninteresting writer, ... Read More...
Blimey has 2011 ended already? We've been so busy reading our way through piles of brilliant books that we'd hardly noticed! We thought it might be nice to fill you in on what everyone's been reading, so here's The Dabbler Book Club's round up of the year just gone.... We've had ... Read More...
Today's 1p (or in this case, 1 cent) book is recommended by guest reviewer Michael Schauerte... Tomorrow I must begin a new life. How could I do it, with nothing but death behind me? Wladyslaw Szpilman’s new life began in January 1945. More than five years of death were behind him, stretching ... Read More...
