Wes Phillips

On his website, Neil Gaiman pulls off the difficult accomplishment of making me want to read Alan Moore's Lost Girls in a longer version of an essay published in Publisher's Weekly.

Friends like John Marks actually send me stuff like this John Derbyshire National Review book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. Derbyshire's essay is argumentative and intriguing—the very qualities that Wade seems to have mastered in his book.

The Beeb is canceling Top of the Pops. Not that I ever watched it, but it's one of those things like the Grand Canyon that always seemed like it was eternal.

Here's a fascinating review of John Bridcut's Britten's Children, a book that traces Benjamin Britten's fascination with a succession of young boys and that obsession's role in the creation of so much of his glorious music.

That's ray guns to you and me—and Lockwasher has assembled a beautiful bevy of 'em. I love the spray-gun/toilet float-ball jobbie and just may be inspired to create a few of my own—depending, as Lockwasher says, on what kind of stuff I find.

Virginia Hall was considered so dangerous by the Gestapo that they crafted a Wanted poster with her likeness. The UK made her an MBE and the US awarded her the DSC—the only woman ever to receive that honor. She parachuted behind enemy lines with her "wooden leg in her backpack." So why haven't I ever heard of this remarkable woman?

"Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,




Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;




Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide,




Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit




To his full height!”