As the Leveson Inquiry trundles interminably on, guest poster Michael Noble (aka @Contact_Light) revisits Evelyn Waugh's classic novel about hack behaviour... One of the favoured resorts of tabloidese is the word ‘tragic’, easily inserted into a pithy headline, or appended as an adjective. It would be all too tempting also to apply ... Read More...
Novels
Today's hero of slang is the peerless P.G., whose contribution to the language, especially the language of alcohol consumption, cannot be overestimated... Setting aside, now I check, the small matter of two no. 10s in the series, this is the thirteenth Hero of Slang. I find it almost inconceivable that Wodehouse ... Read More...
A novel entitled The Third Reich was discovered among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death in 2003, and has only recently been published in book form. Elberry tries to get to grips with it... Bolaño is a vexing writer. He is generally hailed as a great genius, and even in translation ... Read More...
Dabbler Book Club member Monix reviews William Boyd's latest blockbuster. We also have a couple of copies to give away - see below... Lysander Rief, a quite handsome, quite well-educated, quite successful young actor, engaged to be married to one of England’s most glamorous actresses, has cancelled all his plans, withdrawn ... Read More...
Today, Mahlerman examines the legacy of James Joyce: the language in the music, and the music in the language... The great modernist writer James Joyce was so saturated in music that, for a while as a young man, he considered devoting his life to it, but although music's loss became literature's ... Read More...
We've decided to start 2012's Dabbler Book Club off with a bang - This month we're offering members the chance to get their hands on one of the most incendiary literary hits of the last year - The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Sisters ... Read More...
This week Jonathon Green goes hunting with a Victorian writer who attacks head-on "a reality of contemporary life that Dickens almost wholly sidesteps"... Slang is urban and so am I and horses have never entered the picture. Maybe it's some residual memory of Cossacks. At the Lincolnshire Handicap of 1953, I ... Read More...
Blimey has 2011 ended already? We've been so busy reading our way through piles of brilliant books that we'd hardly noticed! We thought it might be nice to fill you in on what everyone's been reading, so here's The Dabbler Book Club's round up of the year just gone.... We've had ... Read More...
It took Nige years to find this brilliant novel in a secondhand bookshop. If only he'd known you can buy it for a penny online... The novels of Muriel Spark that most frequently turn up in charity shops are The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, A ... Read More...
Elberry enjoys an "unnervingly lucid" mix of horror and comedy... This is an extremely funny book about booze, bars, violence, and horrible sex. Not new subjects but then how many could there be, in the 21st Century? In any case, deWitt's manner is so peculiar, so arresting, he seems to exist ... Read More...
