Rayner Heppenstall’s 1943 novel Saturnine opens with the following “Acknowledgements And Disclaimer”:

Fragments of this narrative have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Kingdom Come, The New English Weekly and Partisan Review. It is fiction. Outside pp. 130-134, all the characters are imaginary, and no further reference is made to a living or recently deceased person except Messrs. L. N. Fowler of Ludgate Circus, Dr. Pearson of the Middlesex Hospital, the Grand Duke Cyril of Russia, Lifar, de Basil, Balanchine, Nijinsky, Legat and Diaghilev of the Russian ballet, Lawrence of Arabia and D. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington, the late Canon H. R. L. Sheppard, Jessie Matthews and Sonnie Hale, Isobel Baillie and Anna Wickham, Lady Astor, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, Gabo, Miró and George Bernanos, Gordon Craig, Heifetz and Rudolf Steiner, a number of all-in wrestlers and Joe E. Brown, Clark Gable and the Chinese naval attaché, Marshal Pétain, M. Stalin and Mr. Winston Churchill, the late Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the Hangman and the reigning house of this realm.

A further snippet from Piers Brendon’s Eminent Edwardians (1979):

Elegant and well-born (“All our family go to Heaven”), Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence became treasurer of the WPSU. Like other Suffragettes she had previously been engaged in a bizarre form of Edwardian philanthropy, the endeavour to restore to the brutalized urban masses their lost sense of the pulsating joy of Merrie England by means of folk songs and Morris dances.

Is it too late to try this again?

Daily Mail bashers like to trot out the newspaper’s sympathetic line towards the Nazis in the run-up to the Second World War. It seems to me that this is now far too familiar a charge, and that if we are going to delve into history to find sticks with which to beat the paper, some fresh snippet is long overdue. I was pleased, therefore, to find this anecdote about Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail, in Piers Brendon’s Eminent Edwardians (1979):

The campaigner against the use of birds’ feathers to decorate women’s hats once wantonly struck down a seagull with his stick and beat it to death on the sand.

Incidentally, Northcliffe seems to have had a thing about hats. In 1910, he issued a directive to his editorial staff:

It is about time men had a new hat. Why not offer £100 for the best design for a new hat? There is at present only the silk hat, the pot-hat or bowler (what in America is called a Derby), the straw hat, the felt hat of various shapes (usually referred to as the Trilby – I do not know why) and the universal cap. A new-hat-for-men competition would be most amusing . . . Let reference be made to hat monotony.

Northcliffe would probably have been able to answer Peter Blegvad’s questions about hats.

It is increasingly apparent that the so-called “real world” edges closer to the even more real world of Hooting Yard with every passing day. On Thursday, I wrote about Ned Mossop, Cow Detective. Granted, this news item concerns goats rather than cows, but nevertheless it seems spookily like the kind of thing that might happen at Hooting Yard . . .

Thanks to Elberry for drawing the clipping to my attention

“But the garden, that was the shocker. I could see a greenhouse, but I couldn’t get into that, the door wouldn’t open. The passion flowers had taken over, and beyond that the undergrowth closed in. Now this was a garden just 90-foot long, a garden in a street, and I couldn’t see the end of it.

“Showing out of the undergrowth were statues which looked thousands of years old, some from the Middle Ages, some Roman, and there were barbaric heads that must have been even older. I turned to Bob, but all he said was ‘Oh, that was Dad’. He told me his father used to carve things and leave them in the garden until the green had grown over them, then he would take them to some churchyard and hide them in the long grass, saying ‘That’ll give ’em something to think about’.”

‘Dad’ was J. L. Carr, the speaker is the man who bought his house in Kettering after Carr’s death. From The Last Englishman : The Life Of J. L. Carr by Byron Rogers (2003).

Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Some of you, when you go down from the University, will go into the Church, or to the Bar, or to the House of Commons, or to the Home Civil Service, or to the Indian or Colonial Services, or into various professions. Some may go into the Army, some into industry and commerce; some may become country gentlemen. A few – I hope a very few – will become teachers or dons. Let me make this clear to you. Except for those in the last category, nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

John Alexander Smith, Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, introducing a series of lectures in 1914.

Having listed some of the “heady confect” of words revived in his poetry by Wallace Stevens, Roger Kimball turns to W H Auden and finds

Auden often remarked on his fondness for the Oxford English Dictionary. In later life, it provided some of his favourite reading matter and indeed was the source of many of the lexical curiosities that – increasingly – bedizened his poetry . . . In a review of Epistle To A Godson (1972), one critic lists “blouts, pirries, stolchy, glunch, sloomy, snudge, snoachy, scaddle, cagmag, hoasting, drumbles”, among others. How many do you know?

From The Permanent Auden by Roger Kimball, collected in Experiments Against Reality (2000).

In an appreciative review of the second, expanded edition of Harmonium (1931), R P Blackmur remarked that “the most striking if not the most important thing” about Stevens’s verse was its vocabulary, a heady confect including such rarities as “fubbed”, “girandoles”, “diaphanes”, “pannicles”, “carked”, “ructive”, “cantilene”, “fiscs”, and “princox”.

From Wallace Stevens : Metaphysical Claims Adjuster by Roger Kimball, collected in Experiments Against Reality (2000)

I wrote about scarecrows recently. Now I learn that there is a scarecrow festival in Kettlewell, North Yorkshire. Very, very spooky.

Elsie Schrotthaufen discovers a superb book by Mary Frances Strong.

Not being an evildoer myself, I find it hard to believe that one of my fellow creatures – what am I saying? – a monster, indeed, could have obliged a woman to point a revolver at his head, and I am even less capable of explaining his flight.

I am no hero of bravado, but I am not afraid; I do not court danger, but I have courage, sustained energy, and a will of iron . . . To be killed by a bullet from the revolver of a pretty woman, held in an adorable hand, aimed by eyes that could make an Andalusian’s pale by comparison . . . Few men can hope to die that way.

In this life, one is exposed to many things: one can be bitten by a mad dog, stung by a fly, run over by an omnibus, or be the victim of a derailing. A termite can slyly find its way into your ceiling, you can suddenly receive some bad news, you can catch cholera, you can burn your mustache, you can be blinded by a falling star, you can have a mother-in-law, you can lose your umbrella . . .

Hippolyte Bazard, in a letter to Henriette Francey after she had threatened him with a pistol. A few days later, she shot him dead. Quoted in Victorian Murderesses : A True History Of Thirteen Respectable French And English Women Accused Of Unspeakable Crimes by Mary S Hartman (1977)

Although barely literate, Henri Lacoste seems to have had intellectual pretensions. He used to spend hours with an old friend who had two pet projects: designing a revolutionary sort of barometer and solving the vexing problem of squaring the circle. Lacoste considered himself an expert in several fields . . . friends reported that his normal manner of greeting male acquaintances was to leap on them from behind with growling noises and mock biting sounds.

from Victorian Murderesses : A True History Of Thirteen Respectable French And English Women Accused Of Unspeakable Crimes by Mary S Hartman (1977)

As we know, Gerard Manley Hopkins mesmerised a duck. However, he may have practised beforehand, like this little chap:

from Elsie Schrotthaufen

I am told that adherents of the Hindu faith are enjoined to feed monkeys on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Can this possibly be true?

Many thanks to Futility Closet for this clipping from The Times, 9 May 1854:

An accident, the consequences of which are expected to be fatal, took place at Cannes on Sunday last. A M. Despleschin, of Nice, had announced his intention of making an ascent in a balloon, and two gentlemen, M. Hardy, of Cannes, and M.A. de Sorr, a literary man from Paris, had made arrangements to accompany him. These two gentlemen had taken their seats in the car, M. Despleschin not having yet entered it, when some person in the crowd, anxious to see the balloon start, cried out ‘Let go.’ The man who held the ropes, thinking that the order had come from the aeronaut, obeyed, and the balloon rose rapidly into the clouds, and disappeared. M. Hardy and M. de Sorr are both entirely ignorant of the management of a balloon, and it is feared that they have been carried out to sea. Up to the 2d. no intelligence had been received of them.