No causal connection has wealthy beginning
In the middle of 1944, a series of apparently innocuous answers in the crossword puzzle of the Daily Telegraph began to cause alarm at MI5. In the space of a few weeks, the words ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Neptune’, ‘mulberry’ and ‘overlord’ all featured as solutions to the crossword. What was significant was that these were all codewords relating to the soon-to-occur (and supposedly secret) Allied invasion of Normandy.
Coincidence? Espionage? Treason? The answer, like the solution to a good cryptic clue, is as appealing as it is obvious.
P. E. Warburton’s culinary tip #1: It can take as long as 36 hours to boil a camel to the point at which it can be devoured in its entirety.
Totally unsurprised to learn that the first attempt to walk across the Nullarbor Plain was met with a certain amount of difficulty.
The ‘scuttlers’ of nineteenth century Manchester
Like our ‘larrikins’, but with a more honest name. Author of a just released book on the gangs of nineteenth century Manchester and London says he was fascinated by the “unchanging role of dress and personal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang”. An example is the ‘donkey fringe’ hairstyle, “which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right”.
Fabulating the Australian desert: Australia’s lost race romances, 1890 – 1908
A look at the bizarre adventure-romance novels set in the Australian interior at the turn of the twentieth century, including George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian.
Pirates and printers
A brief account of book smuggling in the British Isles in the late eighteenth century.
