On the anniversary of Churchill's death we pick out some highlights from his portraits of the era's great men. Here's how David Lloyd George's mysterious Welsh wiles confounded a very grand statesman... I’ve just finished reading Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a collection of biographical essays. You rapidly realise how he managed to earn huge sums from ... Read More...
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Jon Hotten – aka the Old Batsman – is known for his cricket writing. But he’s also the author of Muscle, a hugely entertaining insight into the alarming world of professional bodybuilding. Here he explains how his involvement with the muscle business began… Bodybuilding is a world that seems very distant ... Read More...
Music snobs used to look down on the supreme melodist Tchaikovsky. More fool them, says Mahlerman... More than fifty years ago, when I stopped keeping spit in a bottle and began to find pictures of native African girls in National Geographic arousing, I also became aware in my fevered wanderings that the ... Read More...
I’ve taken on a gig writing about culture and whatnot for sofa.com, purveyors of fine furniture and certainly the best place in the visible universe to buy a sofa, and have already written about Vincent Van Gogh's chairs, Impressionist Interiors, His Girl Friday, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette ... Read More...
Nige unearths a neglected gem of Victorian poety by the almost-forgotten Jean Ingelow... Unless a man is an extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; ... Read More...
Frank remembers his father, who would have been 90 years old today... I remember Joe Brainard, Georges Perec, and Gilbert Adair. In I Remember (1970) Brainard devised a form of memoir-writing based on short, single-sentence fragments, following no particular sequence, each beginning with the words “I remember ...” The memory that ... Read More...
In a Dabbler tradition which we've just made up, our New Year's Day post is a repeat of the best post from the previous year. This year it's this glorious exclusive extract from Jonathan Meades' memoir An Encyclopaedia of Myself, which we first ran in August. Enjoy! He rode his bicycle home ... Read More...
In the final part of our serialisation of The Whartons of Winchendon... Jonathan Law revisits Winchendon - a place both 'perfectly mysterious and rather dull' and considers the historical legacy of the remarkable Wharton family... I’m climbing the ridge road to Winchendon for the first time in months, the first since ... Read More...
In the penultimate part of our serialisation of The Whartons of Winchendon, Jonathan Law addresses the question: 'Just how mad was Goodwin Wharton?' ... Although the Glorious Revolution made the Wharton family one of the great powers in the land, the new regime was at first slow to recognize the merits of Goodwin – ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple remembers his great-grandmother... Mary Irene and I used to hunt snakes in the fields behind her house. By July the mustard flowers and tumbleweeds had dried up and blown away to uncover the little holes where I imagined that snakes plotted and hid. Playing the chivalrous protector, I would ... Read More...
