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If you are going to suffer a traumatic injury, it might be a slight source of consolation that it has contributed to a greater understanding of the human anatomy, as happened to Phineas Gage, a worker on the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Vermont. He and his team were cutting through the mountains by drilling a hole in the rock, pouring in gunpowder, inserting a long fuse, tamping it down,…

Children’s rhymes have long had  dark side to them or a deeper, hidden meaning, but it is unusual for them to be used to take a pot shot at a contemporary art movement, but that is what married couple Mary Mills Lyall and Earl Harvey Lyall did when they published The Cubie’s ABC in 1913.    For context The Armory show in New York City held an exhibition which introduced Americans to not only…

A review of Common Sense is all you Need by J J Connington – 260616 The seventeenth and final book in Connington’s Sir Clinton Driffield, published in the year of the author’s death in 1947, sees the surprisingly hands on Chief Constable tackle a case that involves murder, blackmail, manic bibliophiles, con artists, and even the whiff of buried treasure. He is aided and assisted by his faithful,…

Cookery books are now ten a penny, a charity shop would not be worth its salt without a row of discarded volumes, but Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, the first edition of which appeared in 1747, was one of the first to open the eyes of the British public to a wider range of gastronomic delights. It introduced the reader to trifle with jelly, Hamburgh sausages, piccalilli,…

A review of Bodies From the Library, edited by Tony Medawar – 260613 I have come rather late to the party, but I am enjoying my canter through the Bodies From The Library series, curated by Tony Medawar from work that have either been published once in a newspaper, magazine or a collection or have never seen the light of day. The other criterion is that they are written by accomplished crime…

There are three linguistic tics that really get my goat, the indiscriminate peppering of sentences with the otiose like, the use of multiple instead of the perfectly adequate some, several or a number of, and the overuse of the word. It seems that we are all on, like, multiple journeys in our lives, from the mundane to the really life-changing. What is more energising than the innate attempts to…

The first thing to realise about Third Party Risk, originally published in 1962, is that its author is a woman, Constance Dowdy, and that the masculine sounding Guy Cullingford is a nom de plume. For her eighth novel she decides to tackle the role of women in society and to explore the concept of whether the world would be a better place if women were in charge. It is an idea as old as the hills,…

I had the misfortune to be bitten by a horse fly, not once but twice within the space of seven days, necessitating two courses of antibiotics to get the swelling down. There are thirty species in the UK but the good news, if it can be described as such, is that it is only the females that bite as they need a satisfying meal of blood to produce eggs. With an ability to fly at speeds upwards of…

Learning the fundamentals of punctuation, when to spray your text with commas, the difference between a colon and a semi and when, if ever, to use an exclamation mark, can be a tedious and exasperating experience. Of course, it is best to get the basics ground in at an early age, but this seems to fly against modern educational theory where freedom of expression trumps obstacles such as spelling,…

A review of Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie – 260609 When the epitome of efficiency that is Miss Lemon starts making silly typing mistakes, even someone less alert than Hercule Poirot would realise that something is amiss. She tells her employer that she is worried about her sister, Mrs Hubbard, who is warden at a student hostel on Hickory Road which has been hit by a spate of…

What did an intrepid traveller in early 19th century Britain use to ensure that they got from A to B as expeditiously as possible? Well, most probably they would reach for a copy of Paterson’s Roads, their equivalent of Google Maps or a sat nav, which ran to eighteen editions between 1771 and 1826. As Edward Mogg said in the preface to the last edition, “it is an attempt, as far as the nature of…

A review of Suicide Excepted by Cyril Hare – 260607 The third and final book in the Inspector Mallett series, originally published in 1939, sees Hare turn a couple of Golden Age tropes on their heads, a senior officer of the Yard being interrogated in his offices by an amateur sleuth about what he knows of the events leading up to the death of Leonard Dickinson and a murder planned to look like…

Many of us of a certain age will have heard the message coming from the earpiece of our telephone that “at the third stroke the time will be [hour], [minute], [second]”, followed by three precise audio pips. In its heyday, the speaking clock received some 250 million calls a year, but with the advent of more accurate watches and then smartphones and other gadgetry that display the time, numbers…

A review of Men Die at Cyprus Lodge by John Rhode – 260605 If there was a prize for the worst book title, Men Die at Cyprus Lodge, the thirty-ninth novel in John Rhode’s Dr Priestley series, originally published in 1943, would run the winner pretty close. Rhode, one of the noms de plume of the prolific writer, Cecil Street, obviously invested the energy in his little grey cells in devising a…

On January 10, 1913, the American cartoonist, Alfred Frueh, sat down and wrote a love letter to his wife, Giuliette Fanciulli, a romantic gesture befitting of a caring husband, but it was no ordinary letter. The couple were about to travel over to Paris and visit all the major galleries, a prospect which Giuliette viewed with apprehension. Frueh, who had by this time already developed a…

Unlike the Reverend Edward Casaubon, George Eliot’s memorable character in Middlemarch (1871), who spent much of his life researching the doomed Key to all Mythologies, Edmund Fry did at least manage to complete the work that encapsulated his particular obsession. In 1799, coincidentally the year in which the Rosetta Stone was discovered, Fry published Pantographia; containing accurate copies of…

A review of Death Takes a Flat by Miles Burton – 260602 It is a bit of a facer when, being shown a flat where you propose to spend your retirement, you find that it contains a body with a stiletto knife sticking out of its back. That is what happened to Major Pontefract and his wife when they were shown an expensively priced and jerry-built vacant flat at Mersea Rise, a huge apartment block on…