Irivine Welsh's novels contain some of the densest slang writing in fiction. Jonathon 'Mr Slang' Green ventures into the dark side of Scottish language... It is a good thing that Eric Partridge was spared Irvine Welsh. Not because the former was a bad lexicographer nor the latter a bad writer, but ... Read More...
Britain
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...
Want to get your hands on one of the best nature books of the year? Read on to find out how you can win one of 3 copies of Meadowland by John Lewis-Stemple... What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life ... Read More...
Tens of millions of Britons learnt to read with the Peter and Jane books. In her second piece for The Dabbler, Ladybird expert Helen Day examines how the books - and their revisions - reflected British middle-class life, or an ideal of it... Do the words 'Peter and Jane' take you back ... Read More...
While the rest of the world thinks it's Valentine's Day, at The Dabbler we know that the real significance of today is that it marks the 250th anniversary of Percy's Reliques. Prof Nick Groom explains how the seminal collection of ballads kickstarted the British folk tradition... On 14 February 1765 – St ... Read More...
Helen Day is the curator of surely the most authorative website about Ladybird Books on the net. Her knowledge of and enthusiasm for the children's educational classics has seen her feature in newspaper articles, radio shows and TV documentaries. In the first of a series of posts for The Dabbler, ... Read More...
On the anniversary of Churchill's death we pick out some highlights from his portraits of the era's great men. Here's how David Lloyd George's mysterious Welsh wiles confounded a very grand statesman... I’ve just finished reading Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a collection of biographical essays. You rapidly realise how he managed to earn huge sums from ... Read More...
So, The Day of Reckoning has finally arrived. As Scots - or rather, current residents of Scotland - head to the polling booth with the fate of the Union on a knife-edge, our own Daniel Kalder explains, particularly for the benefit of non-Britons, what the hell is going on with the ... Read More...
Keats, Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Wollenstone, Burns... they all died in their prime. But what would it have meant, for art and for the world, if they had lived their full three score and ten? Professor Nick Groom offers a counterfactual history of the long-lived Romantics... What would have happened if John ... Read More...
No sniggering at the back, please, as we plunder Wikipedia for this week's unusual article about a village in Dorset that probably never appeared in any of Thomas Hardy's novels... Shitterton is a hamlet in Dorset, England. It has attracted worldwide attention for its name, which dates back at least a thousand years and ... Read More...