Professor Nick Groom's book The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year is a celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. Following his Christmas post for The Dabbler, Nick turns his attention to February... All the ... Read More...
History
Mahlerman starts 2014 in glorious fashion with the 'rebirth' of music in Venice... The Renaissance period, in art, literature and music is generally said, for convenience, to begin around 1400 and pass into the Baroque two hundred years later; and though this 'rebirth' may be true of painting and sculpture - ... Read More...
Professor Nick Groom's new book The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year is a celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. In an exclusive post for The Dabbler, Nick looks at the English Christmas... Hallowe’en, ... Read More...
HoHoHo, wishing a merry Nazi Christmas to all readers of The Dabbler and The Wikiworm! I'm looking forward to a 2014 full of questionable facts and eyebrow-raising articles from the deepest depths of Wikipedia. 2013 has been a blast, see you in the new year. The celebration of Christmas in Nazi ... Read More...
The Ancient Egyptians really weren't very bright, argues Frank... Two things serve to persuade me that the Ancient Egyptians were a peculiarly dim-witted rabble. There is a tendency to regard the great civilisations of the past through rose-tinted spectacles. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, writing of “the glory that was Greece ... Read More...
Time for the second installment on the curiosities of our capital city from Peter Watts - journalist,self-confessed London geek, and author of Know London. Streets beneath streets, layer upon layer, we descend into history... Paul, the librarian at Time Out, first told me about the street beneath Charing Cross Road in ... Read More...
How did Thanksgiving evolve from a simple religious ceremony into a violent shopping stampede?... Spaniards have their Running of the Bulls at Pamplona; Americans have their Stampede of the Shoppers on Black Friday. Both are high risk, violent sports that frequently end in severe injury or death. Black Friday falls on ... Read More...
The Stalinist era's climate of fear shaped the work of dozens of composers. This week, Mahlerman examines Soviet music... A few months ago in Degenerate Music we looked at Adolf Hitler's totalitarian response to anything in 'the arts' that failed to meet the exacting Nationalistic standards he had set out, after ... Read More...
Selling Scottish genealogy to Americans is big business. Pity it's mostly a load of bunk... Exploring my father’s bookcase on one of my visits home, I came across a curious little pamphlet entitled 64 Common Errors in Scottish History. My father had quite an extensive library but I had never known ... Read More...
There was so much to admire about Fanny Cradock. And then it all went wrong... I can’t quite make up my mind about Fanny Cradock. I’m on the fence about this one. There are many things to admire: the innovative cookery programmes, the slick, ball-gowned cookery demonstrations presented to packed audiences ... Read More...
