Steve Bruce, the former Manchester United player, was sacked as manager of Sunderland last week. Fortunately, Bruce has an alternative career to fall back on. Few people realise that a decade ago Bruce self-published two short football-based thrillers - sort of soccer-based versions of Dick Francis - entitled Striker! and Sweeper! (A proposed third instalment, Defender! ... Read More...
Novels
Gaw ruminates on the significance of Solzhenitsyn's final work in a world where even disaffected and idealistic Occupiers no longer really seem very sure of anything... In a little less than a month we mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. I haven't seen a single mention ... Read More...
Nige ponders the ever-spiralling hyperbole of book blurbs... Recently I reread Lolita, probably for the fifth or sixth time - it never palls, only grows richer and more wonderful with each reading, the sure sign of a great, rather than merely good, book. The copy was my battered old Penguin, dating from 1980 (in ... Read More...
Announcing the winners of this month's Dabbler Book Club choice... Being people who enjoy working at the post-digital technological horizon we've hooked up our Dabbler databases (literally - we've also employed fishing line) to a reconditioned, random-name-generating water mill. The project has been a terrific success and we're now able to ... Read More...
Jonathon Green reveals the original character behind the myth of the chirpy cockney sparrer... Once upon a time there was a rat. My rat. I mourn her still and sometimes I told her story: such as here. She was called Mord Em’ly (above, left). Once upon a time there was a ... Read More...
At The Dabbler we're going to be reviewing more of the best new books, both recent publications and imminent ones. Here James Hamilton reviews the Philip Larkin-haunted story of "a man from England's decaying margins"... I think we 40-to-60-somethings are unforgetting this now, the way we grew up with the threat ... Read More...
Introducing our Dabbler Book Club choice for October... Our Dabbler Book Club choice for this month is Apricot Jam by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. Book club members have the chance of an exclusive preview of this newly-translated collection of short stories by a Russian master, which is to be published in the UK ... Read More...
At The Dabbler we're going to be reviewing more of the best new books, both recent publications and imminent ones. Here Elberry takes on The Sisters Brothers - one of the shortlisted books for the 2011 Man Booker prize - and explains why its protagonists would "brutally and justly pistol-whip Ian McEwan"... If ... Read More...
A “monstrous collection of platitudes”? Harry Paget Flashman makes some modest remarks on the founding documents of the United States of America... I hope that by now you all subscribe to the excellent quarterly magazine Slightly Foxed – the real reader's quarterly. If The Dabbler has a soulmate in quarterly printed ... Read More...
The strange ways of internet commerce mean that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. Today ZMKC turns up an interesting title. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (available here for a penny) is the first Iris Murdoch I'd read. It was published in 1970 (and yet, amazingly, contains a ... Read More...
