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unearths some literary gems.
From The Resurrection Man, by Charlotte MacLeod:
***"The door...has a brass knocker with a face on it.""Anybody's we know?""I hope not. It's more of a symbolic face, like a satyr or a dryad or maybe a gargoyle. I'm not too swift on dryads."***He was wearing...an apologetic little bow tie of no particular color or pattern. He was the sort who tended to remind everyone of someone else. [Noel Coward would approve!]***[The elements in the authenticated painting] were the real McCoy, the guaranteed A-1, simon-pure article.[This sent me down a minor simon-pure rabbit hole. I wasn't familiar with the expression, so I learned about 18th-century theatre's Simon Pure. What was most interesting to me was the detail that, in addition to being a "thing" in itself, simon-purity spills over into real-McCoyness in an additional way--because, in the play in which he appears, someone impersonates Simon Pure, thus giving rise to "the real Simon Pure" as an expression in its own right, à la "real McCoy"! (I also wondered if "Simonizing[tm]" was rooted in simon-purity; but apparently it's just named after one George Simons.)]***"We put father back because the room looked so bleak with that big bare space over the fireplace," Anne explained, "but he doesn't really go at all well with the new slipcovers." [N.B. Slipcovers are funny.]***There was an easy chair and a not-so-easy chair. [I recall that recently, in some other book, we encountered an "uneasy chair." I'll watch out for variations on this theme!]***His head was shaped much like an old-time cheese box, long and angular.***
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