All this dashing Inspector Whozit saves the sweet young thing from the clutching maw of the Black Hand fiction is all very well–none like it better than I–but one longs for something not quite so fraught with tension when one wakes up at 1 or 2 PM in the morning with a frightful headache like costermongers quarrelling.  It is then that the young master likes to dip into the Book of Revelations.  Refreshing stuff.  One reads about giant grasshoppers swanking around making life unpleasant and one has the soothing recollection that it is happening to some other fellow.  Not to oneself, if you follow me.

But not even the roll of years and the dashed English Channel is quite enough separation to read the following with repose, even if it was inflicted on the French.  After all, dash it, one has one’s human feeling.    I am aghast.  Positively:   (more…)