This highly entertaining 1p review comes from guest Mike Petty... Unlike other Saturday-afternoon staples like The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky, the film of Ice Cold in Alex is based on a novel. I simply can't remember if I've read it before, so comprehensively has it been elbowed out ... Read More...
Novels
Elberry considers what JRR Tolkien's masterpiece can teach us about an all-too human emotion. Tolkien’s vision of evil is subtle and extensive. He is not content with black riders and Balrogs and orcs, these dramatic but thoroughly inhuman enemies; there is also the all-too familiar and all-too human emotion of hatred, ... Read More...
This month's Dabbler Book Club selection was The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (buy it here). Below, Dabbler Book Club member Audrey lets you know her thoughts. But what do you think? Please do let us know in the comments. The Stranger’s Child was left abandoned by the Booker prize shortlist this year, ... Read More...
Dabbler Book Club members! We have two free tickets to give away to you for Writing on Houses - Dwelling on Dwelling, an evening of discussion on 19th September at King's Place in London about the relationship between houses and literature involving Alan Hollinghurst (author of the Book Club's choice for ... Read More...
Want to get some free books? Fancy yourself as a reviewer? Alan Hollinghurst's long-awaited latest novel has been the publishing event of the summer. The hype appears justified. The Stranger's Child has been very favourably reviewed, The Guardian comparing the author to both Henry James and Evelyn Waugh, no less: Hollinghurst has a ... 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...
Martin Morgan is a Welsh blogger, exiled to England for his love of fine living. His main achievements are founding the Cymru Rouge hyper-nationalist fraction and coining the word "chwerthfawr". Andrew Rawnsley, in his excellent book on New Labour ,"Servants of the People", refers to Wales as Scotland’s “ugly sister”. This is a ... 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...
After years – no, decades – of meaning to (and at least once beginning to), I finally got round to reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (available for 1p here). Though it has the ultimately elating quality of all really good art, it is a bleak and dejecting ... Read More...
It must be six months now since my first post on The Dabbler. Since then I have posted quite regularly and have enjoy participating in the wise, lively and good-natured banter that is daily Dabber life. So I like to think I am part of The Dabbler community; that I am ... Read More...
