Hayley Campbell speaks good F**&@% English... and writes it bloody well too.

I've been thinking about cusswords following this furore;
Westchester HS girls to serve suspension for 'Vagina' reading Newsday.com, March 7."CROSS RIVER, N.Y. -- Since its Off-Broadway opening in 1996, "The Vagina Monologues" has moved beyond theaters to colleges and high schools. But if performances in educational settings are not uncommon, they still occasionally provoke controversy. In the latest debate over the well-known feminist play, three 16-year-old public high school students were to serve suspensions Wednesday for disobeying officials by saying the word "vagina" during a reading from the script."

The lasses got to front up on the telly while the people in authority worked off their embarrassment. March 10 Lower Hudson Journal news: "District officials and concerned parents have spent the week defending themselves against claims of censorship as news spread across the globe..."

Wait a mo... 'vagina' is a cussword?

Upon starting this blog I made a rule that my English would be of the politest standard as I feared that in the wake of The Fate of the Artist there would be many who would think me rather a rather foul mouthed individual. When I offered the book to First Second Books a couple of years ago, editor Mark Siegel loved it but was concerned about all the cusswords and suggested we might supplant them with asterisks and the like. I understood that the publisher was aiming a great deal of its output at 'younger readers,' but since a lot of the text was actually 'about' the cusswords I argued that it was difficult to take them out without rendering the thing meaningless. And besides, in my experience that's the way the young readers talk.


Since Hayley Campbell moved to London, we have the evidence to prove it. At the big legal office where works the wife of my bosom, the emails have not been getting through. Well, they've been getting through but in a much edited form. It's true. In this day and age, our mail is being censored. Here is a sample email from Hayley Campbell to her beloved Mammy.

Now, you can see that what has happened is that the whole message has been seized and edited by the electronic guardian known as the 'MailMarshall'. The recipient receives the edited version, but instead of the bad words being removed , the recipient just receives the bad words. Only. As evidence that the mail was not good for you we have retained it, but here are the bits that were not good for you. Here's another example.

For the past six months wee Hayley Campbell has been communicating with her dear Mammy entirely in cusswords. We believe she's doing well in her flat in London. Very fuckin well.
******

This is for Stephen Frug.
Here's a single panel comic of a man raising his hat. The most comic part of it is that his head is still stuck in the hat.

(apologies to McCloud, who drew the panel©... and I confess I was chucking stones there, but Stephen's "Best Of the Blogosphere' series of posts is something I found useful when I was forming a picture in my head of what a blog can amount to. It gave me the certainty that it is something worth investing time in. Thanks. And on the off-chance you'll stop fretting about comics and write some more good'uns I'm putting you in my sidebar.)

And speaking of blogging, did you catch this last month in New York mag (via Michael Evans): Say Everything
" As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited."

"Oh, to be a movie star!"

Jules Feiffer's Passionella, 1959, is the book above all others that put the idea in my head that the longform comic strip should become the art of our times. The fact that others chose models of lesser distinction explains why it did not become so.
"The story "Passionella" first appeared in Pageant, but was completely revised and redrawn for this book."
So it says in the indicia. It's fifty pages long. The other stories are "Munro", about a four year old boy who is accidentally drafted. It's about the same length, then there's "George's Moon" and "Boom."

I first came across Feiffer in Time-Life's book of the century in the public library, the volume for the fifties, where he was aligned with Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Bob Newhart as part of 'the new humor'. I may have been fourteen or fifteen at the time ('69-70). I hand-copied the two Feiffer half-page strips in there. Not in order to learn something, just so I could keep them. I didn't know about photcopiers yet. From a few yards away you'd swear they actually were photocopies. I still have those drawings, but can't lay my hand on them. I'll reintroduce the subject when they turn up.
Passionella had an interesting history outside of the book itself, finding itself adapted to the Broadway musical stage:
"The Apple Tree is a series of three musical playlets with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, ( who together also wrote Fiddler on the Roof). Each act has its own storyline, but all three are tied together by common musical themes and references, such as references to the color brown.
The first act is based on Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve; the second act is based on Frank R. Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger? (and has the same ambiguous ending). The third act, based on Jules Feiffer's Passionella, arguably has the most entertaining songs, notably “Oh, to Be a Movie Star.”
The musical opened on October 18, 1966, at the Shubert Theatre in New York, and ran for 463 performances, closing on November 25, 1967. It was produced by Stuart Ostrow, directed by Mike Nichols, and starred Barbara Harris, Alan Alda, and Larry Blyden. Harris won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical." (lifted from Wikipedia, under The Apple Tree)



The Passionella story itself is currently available in Fantagraphics' fourth volume of their projected complete Feiffer where it apppears alongside assorted other stories which i do not have but i have no doubt will be worth having.

Courtroom sketching revisited: "It's tantamount to having a telephone and using a carrier pigeon instead."

Having a personal interest in the much overlooked craft of courtroom sketching, I was stimulated to see a fellow sketcher get the front page (March 28), presumably all around the world. The name of the artist is not given in my local rag, but a quick google shows it to be the work of illustrator Janet Hamlin (google image search shows some book illustration) for the AP. There could have been some other courtroom examples around the net, but they all appear to have been removed. There's an article written by her here, PAD & CHARCOAL -- Sketchbook: Guantanamo Bay By JANET HAMLIN Thursday, April 27, 2006
"Guantanamo Bay is a world within a world. You have beautiful views of Cuba -- open and a bit hilly, with flowers, cacti, the ocean. But look around at the fences, towers and squat military buildings, and you realize you're in a vast enclosure, the residents all in uniform. The AP sent me to Gitmo, as it's called, as a courtroom artist to draw what's going on at the military tribunals. While I was there, I sketched whenever possible. I wanted to warm up my drawing skills and visually gather what I could... " But the short piece is an intro to a showing of sketches which are no longer showing.

From the Toronto Star, March 24: Drawn to the law. Courtroom artist Verna Sadock posts recent drawings in the courthouse in Chicago, Monday, March 19, 2007.
"Court artists say everyone cares about how they're portrayed. Conrad Black wants fewer frown lines," Rick Westhead writes. "What does Conrad Black have in common with Michael Jackson? Both have come under the scrutinizing gaze of sketch artist Verna Sadock... (who) is one of four artists who have spent the past week in U.S. federal court in Chicago drawing Black, Judge Amy St. Eve, the dozen-plus jurors and even reporters scrambling to jot down Black's every scratch, twitch and itch. It's fast-paced work. Using pastel pencils, charcoal and markers, Sadock and other artists finish some drawings in as little as 15 minutes.
Cheryl Cook, who has worked as a sketch artist in Chicago the past 12 years, and other artists typically charge news outlets as much as $400 (U.S.) a day and sometimes make more money selling other pictures to lawyers. Ed Genson, one of Black's lawyers, has been a customer, Sadock said.
"It's a very old fashioned holdover from a time when we lacked technology," said Paula Todd, who hosts a legal affairs show on CTV and is among Cook's customers. "It's tantamount to having a telephone and using a carrier pigeon instead. I think we should be allowing cameras in – all the public is entitled to see."

I remember enjoying an article at Westchester Weekly where Artist Dick Rockwell discussed his career as a court sketcher, but all that remains of it is this image which mark Evanier lifted from it for his obituary of the artist in april last year. Rockwell's earlier career had been as assistant artist on Milt Caniff's Steve Canyon for some 30 years.

Here's an old one: Federal judge ejects sketch artist from court11/30/1993
"A federal judge in Muskogee, Okla., ejected a Texas television station's sketch artist from a courtroom in mid- November, claiming his work disrupted the court proceedings.
Doug Latta, sketch artist for KXII-TV in Sherman, Texas, entered U.S. District Judge Frank Seay's courtroom for a federal $90 million racketeering trial carrying his standard equipment: a sketch pad and an art supply box. He sat three rows from the front with the reporter from the TV station.
Thirty minutes into the hearing, Judge Seay stopped the proceedings and asked the jury to leave briefly. He then asked the bailiff to escort Latta out of the courtroom, saying in open court that he finds sketch artists as disruptive as camera operators, which are not permitted in the court.
The reporter from KXII approached Judge Seay and suggested that removal of the artist raised First Amendment issues. The judge responded that the reporter might have to write in the hall the next day because the judge found note-taking to be distracting, the reporter said."

It reminds of the time Judge Shanahan had me turfed out. I knew it was his policy to allow reporters only in the upstairs gallery. However, as I could only get a view of the top of the accused's bonce from up there I intermingled with his legal people in the hope nobody would notice. I got away with it for about four minutes, which was all I needed. However I told reporter Sharon Marshall it was going to start costing more if such intrigues became the norm. I think that may have been the time our parish priest was in the dock.
*******

Richard Horsman in comments yesterday drew my attention to this. BBC Radio 4 produced an adaptation of Life In London with Greg Wise and Mark Gatiss as Tom and Jerry. It was last year. We missed it. But the page linked to has a glossary of slang terms. Check it out! (excerpt, with a couple of words used in yesterday's extract)
Daffy - gin. Also known as blue ruin, Old Tom, max, flash of lightning, jackey.
Dipper - a pickpocket.
Duce - two-pence.
Dunagen - a privy.
(re the last: they still say 'dunny' in australia for a toilet, obviously from the same source (unknown... My pal White thinks maybe after the proper name of a manufacturer of the porcelain))

In other news.
Authors lose appeal over Da Vinci Code plagiarism-- Guardian, March 28
"Two authors who claimed Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code was largely copied from their earlier book today lost an appeal over the case.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, who appealed against the original high court ruling in April last year, now face legal bills of around £3m."
That'll larn them.

Publishers Weekly, March 27:
Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips "is not only the first English-language collection of Topffer’s work but the first collection of Topffer’s complete comics oeuvre to be published in any language. The copious notes in Kunzle’s appendixes elucidate Topffer’s satiric commentary on the manners, politics and culture of his time."
Sign me up!!

"BOB got a stinker, and poor I received a chancery-suit upon the nob."

While I'm waiting for an advance copy of my new book to arrive (two weeks in the mail from New York already- methinks it is lost), here's a look inside the oldest book I possess, Pierce Egan's Life in London, printed in 1822.
Any attraction for the modern reader is usually considered to lie in the thirty-six aquatints by the Cruickshank brothers, George and Robert, all hand watercolored from a model sheet, as was the custom in the trade, by a shopful of women. But I also have a fondness for Egan's prose, and I'll quote a bunch of it in a minute. The story concerns the characters Jerry Hawthorne and Corinthian Tom, with their pal Bob Logic. I think this is the first pairing of the names 'Tom and Jerry'. I came across them in a later era as the name of a cocktail in a Damon Runyon story (*see below), and in that instance it may have been named for these characters as they were very popular for a spell. The text appears to have been 'wrtten up' to the pictures, which was either standard for the time, or became so afterwards, so that Dickens had to go to some trouble to change the pattern. Egan's prose is full of sporting slang, indeed that seems to be its entire purpose. And at that time 'sporting ' had more to do with 'swells' slumming in a low-life milieu than with feats of athleticism. Egan had previously put out BOXIANA, a valuable history of the sport in those days. There's an excerpt from it here: BOXING MATCH - 1801 (from Pierce Egan's Boxiana, published in 1812)
Here then, one of the Cruikshank prints (with a zoom further down) and the text that accompanied it. I've gone to some effort to keep the peculiarities of Egan's madcap typesetting (a real pain in the arse in HTML). Whether it was peculiar to him, or to sports coverage, or a range of assorted printed texts I do not know.


**(LIFE IN LONDON page 276)
A large kettle, boiling at the spout, was speedily introduced, but instead of water, read boiling Daffy. The assumed gravity of BOB’s mug, upon playing off this trick, was quite a treat; but I am happy to say Crooky booked it. “Come, gents,” said BOB, “please yourselves, here is plenty of water, now mix away.” It had the desired effect. The glass was pushed about so quickly that the “First of the Month” was soon forgotten, and we kept it up till very long after the REGULARS had been tucked up in their dabs, and only the Roosters and the “Peep o’ Day Boys” were out on the prowl for a spree. At length a move was made, but not a rattler was to be had. Bob and the party, chaffing, proposed to see the Author safe to his sky-parlour. The boys were primed for any thing. Upon turning the corner of Sydney’s Alley, into Leicester–Fields, we were assailed by some troublesome customers, and a turn up was the result, (as the Plate most accurately represents.) BOB got a stinker, and poor I received a chancery-suit upon the nob.

(note. That's Tom Hawthorne in the zoom, the author, Egan off to the left in the full view-eddie)
How I reached the upper story, I know not; but, on waking, late in the day, I found my pocket book was absent--without leave. I was in great grief at this loss, not on account of the blunt it contained,--much worse-- the notes in it were dearer than gold to me. The account of JERRY'S introduction to the Marchioness of Diamonds, the Duchess of Hearts, Lady Wanton, Dick Trifle, Bill Dash, &c. &c. on his first appearance in Rotten Row with the CORINTHIAN, booked on the spot. I was in a complete funk. I immediately went to sartain persons, and communicated my loss; how, where and when; and I was consoled, that, if it were safe, PIERCE EGAN should have it. Day after day passed, and no account of it:-- I gave it up for lost, and scratched my moppery, again, and again, but could not recollect, accurately, the substance of my notes. I was sorry for myself;-- I was sorry for the public. However, on Friday morning last, taking a turn into Paternoster Row, my friend JONES, smiling, said he had got the BOOK; --as he is fond of a bit of a gig, I thought he was in fun,-- but, on handing it over to me, with the following letter, my peepers twinkled again with delight.

To the care of Mr Jones, for P. EGAN
Sir,-- You see as how I have sent that are Litter Pocket Book, which so much row has been kicked up about amongst us. Vy it ain’t vorth a single tonic. Whose to understand it? Vy its full of pot-hooks and hangers- and not a screen in it. You are determined nobody shall nose your idears. If your name had not been chaunted in it, it would have been dinged into the dunagan. But remember, no conking.
From Yours, &c
TIM HUSTLE.

APOLOGY
In consequence of BOB LOGIC’S Daffy, only one sheet of Letter Press accompanies the Plates of No. 5; but to make up for this unavoidable deficiency, THREE SHEETS of Letter Press will be given with No 6.
**

(A footnote, not shown, helps us to grasp that Egan's notebook was written in shorthand- 'hooks and hangers')
The last part is interesting from the point of view of figuring out how this stuff was originally serialized. The only notes I've seen on the original running order of the prints are difficult to correlate with the order in the book. The fact that it was left in the collected edition does suggest that the book consists of the parts simply bound to gether, but I've looked at it every which way and I can't get it to work.

(* the cocktail. before publishing this i did a quick google check--amazing what you can get hold of in an instant these days.)
Dancing Dan's Christmas by Damon Runyan (1931?)
"Naturally we start boosting hot Tom and Jerry to Dancing Dan, and he says he will take a crack at it with us, and after one crack, Dancing Dan says he will have another crack, and Merry Christmas to us with it, and the first thing anybody knows it is a couple of hours later and we still are still having cracks at the hot Tom and Jerry with Dancing Dan, and Dan says he never drinks anything so soothing in his life. In fact, Dancing Dan says he will recommend Tom and Jerry to everybody he knows, only he does not know anybody good enough for Tom and Jerry, except maybe Miss Muriel O'Neill, and she does not drink anything with drugstore rye in it."

Wikipedia entry says Egan devised the cocktail as a publicity spin-off.

And obviously, the cartoon cat and mouse are named after the cocktail. Voila! (theirs is the richest Wikipdeia entry I've seen for anything so far).

That leaves one other matter to account for. The linguistic pitting of Tommy (the British soldier) against Gerry (the German) in World War 1 is coincidental and comes by a different route altogether, which is no less curious and interesting.

*****

in other news, Dog-sized toad found in Australia
By Phil Mercer --BBC News, Sydney
"Toadzilla is the biggest cane toad ever found in Australia's Northern Territory and weighs just under two pounds, according to an environmental group. Environmentalists have been trying to stop the spread of the poisonous creatures across the country's tropics..."

sights

in my neighbourhood
video

old books, new books

new books 1
new book 2
old books 1
old books 2

"I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it."

The copyright/plagiarism issue has been shuffling along since we last spoke of it here, when I linked to Jonathan Lethem's article in Harper's of January 30.

Writing in the free world : Jonathan Lethem explains why copyright laws stifle creativity and why he's giving away the film rights to his new novel.---Salon.com March 25 (link via Neil Gaiman)
In response to an observation about the meagre $6,000 dollar advance for his first novel: " Sure, but it wasn't strengthening of copyright control that allowed me to make more money after that; it was because I found some readers. Even if my rights were Kryptonite and lasted 1,000 years, if no one read my books, they wouldn't be worth a penny. The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place."
"I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it. I didn't know if I ever would. I'm very persuaded by the image that Lewis Hyde offers of an artist who is, by definition, in whatever medium, or whatever level of success or whatever culture, in the practice of culture-making; participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one -- making commodities that are also gifts.

Lethem already made special reference to Lewis Hyde, and his concept of 'the gift economy' in the Harper's essay. This review (I think nov 2005) by JoAnn Schwartz of Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage Books, 1983) goes a long way to explaining what Hyde was talking about.
"Hyde is deeply interested in the transformative gift: the gift that changes us profoundly, often received in the form of psychological healing or spiritual teachings. An important aspect of a transformative gift is that the transformation is not instantaneous; it requires the recipient to undertake some extensive and often difficult inner work in order to effect the transformation completely. What motivates us to undertake this labor? In general, it is a feeling of love and gratitude toward our teacher or therapist. This can lead to problems in today's market economy, where healing and teaching are frequently sold rather than freely given. After all, even a gifted teacher, therapist, or spiritual guide must eat! It is nonetheless possible for an element of the gift economy to circulate above the cash.

In science, as elsewhere, the circulation of gifts produces and maintains community, whilst the conversion of gifts to commodities fragments or destroys that same community. However, we are now witnessing the commodification of ideas within the scientific community. Universities and industrial laboratories, which used to produce basic research that was released into 'the public domain' now patent and otherwise protect their research. Discoveries emerge not as contributions but as proprietary ideas for which users must pay a fee, a usury. This trend began in the late 1970's and early 1980's with biotechnology, but here and now, at the end of the millennium, it seems to have spread to most fields of scientific inquiry. How does the "group mind" necessary to produce theoretical physics/chemistry/biology survive the free-market?"

Patent Office (UK) wants evidence to justify new copyright exceptions for artists. (again via Neil)
The Open Rights Group (ORG) is corralling information.
contribution from one John Harding, mar 22: "The conventional publishing industry does a valuable job, but only where there is large money to be made to fuel its necessarily ponderous machinery. A few years ago a friend of mine who was running a chamber music summer schools for amateurs wanted to let them play a pleasant little work by, I think, Panufnik, or possibly Penderecki. They contacted the publishers, asking to buy parts, but were told that the parts were not on sale, but could be hired. The cost would be £100. The work lasted perhaps five minutes. It is not a work that any string orchestra would think of scheduling into a programme. The publishers have effectively killed it.
The internet, software, desktop publishing and the existence of people like the founder of Merton Music, have made possible the creation and dissemination of work that would never bring profits to traditional publishers. We are living in exciting times, whose surge of intellectual activity will be seen in retrospect as putting the Renaissance in the shade.
Of course the corporations want to keep a strangle hold on it.
The move towards criminalising copyright violation significantly changes the picture. A single fine at the level sought by corporate lobbyists could ruin someone who would currently be able to achieve amicable settlement of an honest mistake under civil law. There will be people who will no longer dare act on common sense."

Joyce letters court case settled--BBC News Sunday, 25 March 2007
"A US university professor has won the right to quote letters between Irish writer James Joyce and his daughter in a book after settling a court case".

I got the link for that one at Ownit- The creative London Intellectual Property Advice Service where you can find regular updates on such matters as
Will Charwoman take Family Guy to the cleaners?--19 Mar 2007
Disney gets tough with students acting as nuns this week... etc

*****

more on 300, the movie, (via Heidi) Men Gone Wild by David Denby in this week's New Yorker:
"...perhaps the nuttiest film ever to become an enormous box-office hit. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, the movie is a porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film."

"Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement."

Made in a time of frustration, when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, “300” feels like the product of a culture slowly and painfully going mad."
******

via circulating email of notable quotations.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." --Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst.

Extra! Read all about it.

While I had the 2001 files out yesterday, I saw this piece of art in passing, and remembered the circumstances of its making. The FACE magazine commissioned a drawing of Johnny Depp 'in the FROM HELL style'. I had already drawn him once before, for a tv camera in Paris (The French like a performing element in their cartooning). But this second one, I never should have agreed to it since I couldn't see a better way than just turning a movie still into a From hell panel. Here's was what I came up with. The magazine ran it too small, even smaller than the size you're seeing here. One might ask whether they were having second thoughts on the grounds of good taste except that they and stuck a label over it that read 'A ripping yarn', which clearly marks them as clods. (How many of those scores of papers that used 'ripping yarns' as a header thought they were being cute?)


This isn't bad for what it is; I got a relaxed figure after much effort, but I wish I'd stopped scraping the background hatching much sooner. It was my second attempt at the drawing. The original for the first attempt is in the possession of my pal Christopher Moonlight, who showed it on his blog recently. I abandoned this at the pencil stage and later threw some watercolour over it and put it in my convention portfolio. I'm sure Christopher has done some photoshop tweaking on it into the bargain.


I suspect I drew the next one for free, or didn't bother billing the French magazine Ciné Live, since it is such a carefree drawing, on rough paper with a 6b pencil. What a cluttered mess of a layout though. What were they thinking when they stuck that From Hell page in front the standing Ripper, but tucked under his mitt as though he's selling the late edition?



Ripping yarns! come an' get yer ripping yarns!

The day I was mistaken for an author.

I want to start an occasional series of anecdotal posts about travelling. First up, a trip to Europe in November 2001 that took me and Anne through Singapore. Earlier I had answered a few email questions for my pal Cheng tju ( who once gave me an old copy of Malaysian artist Lat's Town Boy, soon to be published in the States by my publisher First Second) to put together an article for the Straits Times, the English language paper of Singapore, in connection with the upcoming release of the From Hell movie. I had sent ahead an official photo from a set that Liz Pickering recently came round and shot as my last set was taken some ten years previously and they were starting to look like a memento of some other bloke.
Anyway, we boarded the 707 of Singapore Airlines at Brisbane airport November 10 and grabbed a newspaper to browse, when there in front of me was my own mug.

You should be able to click-enlarge that enough to read it. BUT THE ARTICLE WAS ABOUT SIMON WINCHESTER !!!- author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne( 1998).
"(from interview) There's a book by Jonathan Green called Chasing the Sun, which is a history of dictionary making. And I was actually reading this book in the bath one winter's day about two years ago. And there was a footnote which said, you know, in a rather offhand way that, of course, readers will be familiar with the extraordinary story of Dr. W. C. Minor, the American lunatic murderer who was imprisoned in Broadmoor and became a prolific contributor to the OED.
I remember vividly sitting up in the bath and saying I've never heard of this story. And I rang one person in your office, Elizabeth Knowles, who you'll know well, I dare say, and said, "Elizabeth, do you know anything--" well, first of all, I apologized and said, "It's rather vulgar. I'm calling you from my bath in America, but do you know anything about this chap called W. C. Minor?"
And she said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I know rather more about him than most people because I wrote a paper about him for a journal, a quarterly, I think, published in Madison, Wisconsin called "Dictionaries." And if you'd like, if you get out of the bath, I'll fax it to you and you can read it when you're'toweling yourself dry," and so she did.
And I read it and I thought if I can get access to the Broadmoor files on this man, then perhaps there's rather a good book to be written."

Cheng Tju, when we met up with him at the other end of the flight, was crestfallen. Eddie Campbell was in fits of mirth. The Campbell piece appeared a month later with the same photo, confirming in the minds of many in Asia that English people all look alike. As for Simon Winchester, did he get a tearsheet from his publisher's publicity department and wonder who the Hell that other bloke is?

Will the real Simon Winchester please stand up?


I know what it is! it's that thing we do with the hand on the chin, isn't it.