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Agatha Christie’s Diamond Cache, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Agatha-Christie_3002974b

Diamonds recovered from a compartment in a trunk owned by Agatha Christie.

  • Encouraging news for all who let their modifiers dangle: “A stickler insists that we never let a participle dangle, that you can’t say, ‘Turning the corner, a beautiful view awaited me’ … But if you look either at the history of great writing and language as it’s been used by its exemplary stylists, you find that they use dangling modifiers all the time. And if you look at the grammar of English you find that there is no rule that prohibits a dangling modifier … it was pretty much pulled out of thin air by one usage guide a century ago and copied into every one since.”
  • These are some ways we’ve received our mail: from pigeons, balloons, boule de moulins (“hollow zinc spheres the size of a man’s head and covered with fins … the idea was to place them in the river and let them float along the current … the service was canceled after just eleven days”), pneumatic rail, rockets, cats.
  • “Fincher appears to be more pessimistic about love than Kubrick was. Eyes Wide Shut, a post-Freudian work, takes sexual desire very seriously as a realm where the revelation of inner monsters makes it possible to live with them, with ourselves, and with each other. Gone Girl takes identity very seriously; it subordinates sex to power and love to pride, and suggests that the revelation of monstrosities brings knowledge without wisdom, adds pain to pain, covers masks with masks, and shows screens behind screens.”
  • When you’re stressed, you could drink and smoke or squeeze a rubber ball or get a spa treatment or indulge in some petty larceny—or you could just sit down and write a letter to yourself, which is apparently the way to do it.
  • An Agatha Christie fan has discovered the writer’s lost diamonds in a sealed metal strongbox bolted to the bottom of a trunk. “I had read Agatha Christie’s biography,” the fan said, “so I knew exactly what I was looking at.”