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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…

The word picturesque, based on the Italian pittoresco which meant “like a painting”, entered the English language in the early 18th century when the hunt was on for landscapes and views whose charms made them ideal subjects for a picture. Some were not averse to giving nature a hand. Capability Brown thought nothing of embarking upon wholescale excavations to create that perfect vista while…

A review of There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes – 260531 Taking its title from a couplet in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) which goes “and now there came both mist and snow/ and it grew wondrous cold”, the sixth novel in Innes’ Inspector Appleby series, originally published in 1940, might better have been called Much Ado About Nothing. It is the most infuriating…

It was not until August 2, 1880 that time was officially standardized in the UK, thanks to the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, although it had been informally standardized since 1840 across the railway networks. Prior to the 1840s, every city and town in the country had its own local mean time based on when the sun rose and set in their area, meaning that noon in Bristol, for example, was ten…

A review of Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers – 260510 The sixth novel in Dorothy L Sayers’ Peter Wimsey series, Strong Poison, originally published in 1930, is the prequel to the more substantial Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon. In it we finddetective fiction writer, Harriet Vane, on trial for her life, accused of poisoning with arsenic her former live-in lover, Philip Boyes. The evidence…

During the 19th century cattle were allowed to graze on the boundary edge at Dulwich College while the gentlemen from the public school engaged in the noble art of cricket. As in those days, they played with a straight bat and a stiff upper lip, they rarely hit the ball into the deep leg-side of the field stretching between deep mid-wicket and long-on, making it a safe area for cattle to graze.…

One of the key factors in democratizing the joy of reading was the emergence of the chapbook, small, loosely bound pamphlet-like books, which were sold for a penny or less, expensive but still within the reach of the labourer’s purse. Chapbooks took their name from itinerant peddlers known as “chap-men” who carried and sold printed matter hot from the city presses to the eager rural masses. Often…

A review of Murder in Outline by Anne Morice – 260529 Thirteen, lucky for some, unlucky for others. Sadly, Murder in Outline, the thirteenth in Anne Morice’s Tessa Crichton series, originally published in 1979 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is not one of her better efforts. Her amateur sleuth, Tessa Crichton, an actress who is married to a high-flyer at the Yard, Robin Price, is one of those…

As a voracious reader I was somewhat disconcerted to come across a reference to an 18th century Swiss physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, whose thesis seemed to have been that an overindulgence in books could have devastating consequences for the mind and body. Interest piqued, I was keen to find out how my seemingly innocuous habit was putting my health and sanity at risk. Tissot’s An Essay on…