“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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05 July 2014

PEGGY DUBBERLY 31.12.21 - 15.6.14

photo - Philip White
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Dr Peggy Dubberly was a fair dinkum drinkster. I met her after the death of her beloved husband, Cliff, when she became a stalwart member of the Feral Aussie Boullistes' Petanque Club in Rundle Park, Adelaide.  She was a highlight shotgun rider on my 21-day tour of my favourite thirst emporia, Paris to Marseilles in 1995 and was a key participant in The Advertiser readers' wine judging panels at my annual Hyatt South Australian Wine of the Year Awards, where she would complain that certain of her favourites were missing from the line-ups in a full day's tasting - on the blind. Peggy could tell that they weren't there. I know of few expert winemaking wine judges who could do that, even with wines they made themselves. A scary but joyous intellectual and deep believer in the acuity of her own curiosity, she was one of the most stylish and witty party lasses until the end, when she died in her sleep in her 93rd year. Here are some Fino flowers for you Peg, on one of the few great tables we never got out our legs under and elbows on. Bless you, lovely girl.

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