Mr Key's Shorter Potted Brief, Brief Lives - bringing you absurdly abbreviated biographies of the great men and women of history - is published by Constable and is available to buy now. It makes an ideal Christmas present. Dabbler editor Andrew Nixon ('Brit') has written the preface, a version of which we reproduce ... Read More...
Books
Mark Pack would like to hear more about books you thought you knew enough about - but probably didn't. A mere seven years after it came out, I’ve just finished reading (or more accurately, listening to) Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. In case you think I am a remarkably slow reader, I ... Read More...
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...
Back in September 2013, Frank Key posted on The Dabbler his idea of writing a book of very, very brief lives. Thanks in part to the enthusiastic reaction of the Dabbler audience and commenters, this idea has now become a reality, and Mr Key's Shorter Potted Brief, Brief Lives will ... Read More...
In the concluding episode of his series about Phantom Libraries and unwritten books, Jonathan Law comes at last to Borges, monkeys and Babel... In all this talk of lost and phantom libraries there is one giant figure we have yet to consider, although his presence may have been felt hovering in the wings: the great ... Read More...
Back in September 2013, Frank Key posted on The Dabbler his idea of writing a book of very, very brief lives. Thanks in part to the enthusiastic reaction of the Dabbler audience and commenters, this idea has now become a reality, and Mr Key's Shorter Potted Brief, Brief Lives will ... Read More...
Continuing his series about Phantom Libraries and unwritten books, Jonathan Law explores the books that only exist in dreams, and wonders why he once encountered one called Manly Ways to Eat Fruit... There is something peculiarly painful about the idea of the lost or unwritten masterpiece – the great book that no one will read, ever, except ... Read More...
Back in September 2013, Frank Key posted on The Dabbler his idea of writing a book of very, very brief lives. Thanks in part to the enthusiastic reaction of the Dabbler audience and commenters, this idea has now become a reality, and Mr Key's Shorter Potted Brief, Brief Lives will ... Read More...
A discovery in a secondhand bookshop takes Steerforth back to the disappointments and confusions of adolescence... During a recent visit to Camilla's Bookshop in Eastbourne, I found the above novel by Richard Condon. It reminded how much superfluous nudity there used to be on book covers, before feminism, AIDS and the new ... Read More...
Ambrose Bierce was the most brutal book reviewer of his era. It's probably just as well he never had to give his verdict on Oscar Wilde... In his 1967 biography of Ambrose Bierce [above], Richard O'Connor noted that the “chore” of book-reviewing hackwork “unleashed [Bierce's] most savage energies”. We are given two ... Read More...
