[Voiceover:] Previously, on Maud. Having refused to go into the garden with a cad, Maud has taken a draft of laudanum. On waking, she is disturbed by a knocking at her door. The visitor is a person from Porlock, come on business…. “Good heavens, sir. By the evidence of the number ... Read More...
Fiction
Some pretty twee writing on a wall prods Nige's memory of a once-famous author... Quotations have their uses. Without them, according to Wodehouse, any conversation between chaps would be nothing but an endless succession of 'What ho's. Oddly, these days, they are increasingly becoming an element of interior design, gracing the ... Read More...
Having refused to come into the garden, Maud retires to the house. But her troubles are only just beginning... And so it happened that Maud, having resisted the blandishments of the cad whose dearest wish was to coax her into the garden, repaired, not to her inner sanctum to do her ... Read More...
In the Autumn issue of the excellent literary quarterly Slightly Foxed, our own Henry Jeffreys writes about the late David Nobbs' novel The Death of Reginald Perrin... It was eerie the first time I watched the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin because it all felt so familiar. I’d bought a DVD ... Read More...
Nige uncovers a remarkable piece of precocious satire: a young Max Beerbohm sticking it to an Oscar Wilde at the peak of his powers... Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the ... Read More...
Strange to think that an otherwise ordinary wet afternoon in March could have witnessed the most decisive event in human history... Once upon a time there were three little bunny rabbits. Their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, and Satan. Flopsy and Mopsy were completely normal bunny rabbits, but Satan, though to all ... Read More...
Whether it's an action-packed SAS memoir or a grim tale of an abuse-ridden childhood in Ireland, there's only one thing you can guarantee about a smash hit book: that there'll soon be a host of publishers jumping on the bandwagon and filling the shelves with copycat titles with similar covers. Bookseller Steerforth recalls some ... Read More...
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...
Today, a classic from the Frank Key oeuvre. For more such uncategorisable fictive brilliance, you should buy the Dabbler Editions ebook By Aerostat to Hooting Yard: A Frank Key Reader... My mother had a tin ear and a voice like a corncrake. In spite of these shortcomings, she saw it as her maternal ... Read More...
‘Tell me a story from your head instead’, commanded C, apparently bored by the mild misadventures of Paddington. A great weariness came upon me. ‘What about?’ I said, closing the book. ‘About… Mr Chocolate Cake,’ she said at random. ‘And a Princess.' ‘Oh for goodness sake’, I said, and proceeded to tell the most ... Read More...
