The Rings Of Saturn (available for 1p here) is a strange book, not in any conventional sense a novel. It has affinities with the kind of thing the great psychogeographer Iain Sinclair writes - if less convivial and fantastical than Sinclair. Dispensing with what he called the 'grinding noises' of the ... Read More...
Non-Fiction
This Repeat about Michael Wharton's A Dubious Codicil, from August 2010, seems an appropriate companion piece to James Hamilton's discourse on nostalgia, since its concluding sentence is perhaps the purest expression of misguided British nostalgia I've ever written... A Dubious Codicil is the second part of Michael ‘Peter Simple’ Wharton’s autobiography. You can buy it ... Read More...
Dabbler reader Steve Buckley recommends a cricket classic, sometimes described as "the greatest sports book ever written"... In his 1965 article ‘How to Build a Cricket Library’, John Arlott had Beyond a Boundary by CLR James as one of his essential twenty books on the game. Does anyone read it anymore? You ... Read More...
Robert Irwin is an English writer who has written six novels and numerous studies of different aspects of Islamic culture. He is also the Middle Eastern editor of the Times Literary Supplement and has been instrumental in shaping the list of the hyper literary and thoroughly esoteric publisher Dedalus. While ... Read More...
In an exclusive article for The Dabbler, Mark Mason, author of this month's Dabbler Book Club choice Walk the Lines (published today), explains how he came to walk the entire London Underground network, overground... My project to walk the entire London Underground network overground started as a way of ‘conquering’ the city – ... Read More...
Our friends at Slightly Foxed (the real readers' quarterly - buy a subscription now!) have once again kindly allowed The Dabbler to dip into its rich archives. In this article from the Autumn 2004 edition (issue 3),author Julia Keay recounts a remarkable river journey... I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often ... Read More...
Nige finds two extraordinary collectors within the pages of that lepidopterist's Bible, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors ... Like Gaul, The Aurelian Legacy is divided into three parts - a history of the British butterfly fancy, a biographical dictionary of notable butterfly men and women, and essays on some of ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his 'Heroes of Slang' series... The essence of ’arry, he sez, is high sperrits. That ain't so fur out. I'm ‘Fiz’ not four ’arf, my dear feller. Flare-up is my motter, no doubt. Carn’t set in a corner canoodling, and do the Q. T. day and night. My mug, mate, was made ... Read More...
Author Rupert Thomson, whose memoir This Party's Got to Stop was our most recent Book Club choice, provides an exclusive Q&A for The Dabbler... Was This Party's Got to Stop a book that you had to write, for reasons of catharsis perhaps? How long had you been 'writing it' in your ... Read More...
This month's Dabbler Book Club selection was Rupert Thomson's This Party's Got To Stop. Tomorrow we have an exclusive Q&A with the author, but today Dabbler editors Gaw and Brit provide their reviews... Gaw One of the good things about book clubs is that you read and end up enjoying books you ... Read More...
