unearths some literary gems.
***
[Freudian Typos dept., Putting the Pumpernickel in Pimpernil div.]
He went on to tell her some wild tale about a case he'd just wrapped up, exaggerating his own Scarlet Pimpernil roll [sic] in the proceedings.
***
Brian Ely was a stocky man with a head like a bullet, which was close to his shoulders, so that he seemed to be perpetually shrugging.
***
"Even adults sometimes find it hard to read Charles Dickens"...
"I skip the hard parts, but it doesn't hurt because he wrote so many pages about everything."
***
[In reference to a figure in a Renaissance painting.]
"This is St. Who?"
[The figure is subsequently always referred to as St. Who, and a saint in a companion panel becomes "the second St. Who."]
***
"You know what they say, 'See Florence and die.'"
"Actually, what they say is, 'See Rome and die.'"
"Well, it makes no difference, since you'd be dead, anyway."
[Actually, it looks from a Web search like what "they" actually say may be, "See Naples and die."]
***
...the A-41 that would take them to the center of London, or would have done if they hadn't got off onto the A-nothing and taken a wrong turn.
***
He decided he would take dumb rhetorical questions literally from now on.
***
The next morning Melrose was awakened at some intransigent hour by Trueblood's banging on his door.
["Intransigent" times of day are new to me!]
***
"If I'm getting fat, you-know-who would let me know tout de suite."
"I don't know you-know-who."
***
["We were just talking about this!" dept.]
The sign...was decorated with flowers, mushrooms, and little green people Jury took for wood sprites or aliens.
***
[People Talking About People You've Never Heard of as Though You're Supposed to Know Who They Are dept.]
"Miss Bosley wants this tout de suite, and you know what she's like!"
Jury smiled and said he didn't. It occurred to him that Basil lived in a world where everybody knew everybody else.
***
"You wouldn't even have thought much about Father Christmas until you were four, say. So if you stopped at age five--well, it was hardly worth it, believing. You might as well just have gone ahead and disbelieved."
***
"I suppose you know Christmas is the day after tomorrow," said Polly Praed.
She made it sound as though its propinquity were Melrose's fault.
***
Melrose loved to find things inside other things and was delighted to see three little tea caddies nesting inside the big one.
***
"You said you just got back from Florence."
"Uh-huh."
"But you said it as if that explained something."
"Florence--" Melrose paused. "Florence explains everything!"
***
The middle-aged Americans smiled at him on their way out and he returned the smile. So they smiled again, perhaps thinking they had short-changed this man in the smile department.
***
There was a series of clicks and then the tone, which went on and on. Who in hell was calling Jury? The cast of the Royal Shakespeare Company? The Bolshoi Ballet?
***
