Some scholars think that Samuel Johnson had Tourette syndrome, based on accounts of his verbal, physical and behavioural tics.

The convention of using the mother's family surname as a middle name produced some pretty cool names.

Surely she knows that Christianity emerged in an economy based on slavery (and opposed it)? That the medieval church helped alleviate poverty? That the creation of secular public relief in England was partly a consequence of the Reformation impacting the church's earlier work?

I do like the 1980s Viragos.

Season two didn't so much open with a hard reset as painful whiplash.

Hope it goes with as few hitches as possible and you're able to get settled before the holidays.

If you haven't already read it, Aldington writes about the challenge of translating this book in his memoir, Life for Life's Sake.

A bit unclear - there isn't a 'cash ISA limit' now. The £20k limit is a total cap on any combination of ISAs, except for the lifetime ISA.

Does this mean that the overall cap will stay at £20k but only £12k of that can be in cash?

I can understand why the book's original ending would be hard to sell to audiences in the wake of real events. And you could read the cheerier ending the film gives us as someone's wishful imagining, rather than an alternative reality. But it does feel like it was hacked about post test screenings.

It also includes some interesting backstory on Big Brother and whether he is - or was - a real person, one of the questions that O'Brien refuses to answer.

It's an authorised retelling, which enables Newman to include substantial chunks of dialogue from the original (sometimes in a context that enables you to read them quite differently).

A major interest of the novel is its exploration of women's lives in Airstrip One, sometimes expanding on brief references in Orwell's original (such as the hostel for single women where Julia lives, or the Party's artificial insemination programme - which girls join to conceal illegal pregnancy).

Thanks, I didn't know that. Have never seen the play.

Yes, because she'd jumped through Glory's portal that was meant to unleash hell (with the assumption that some kind of hell dimension lay on the other side).

OK, the Telegraph publishes some silly stuff, but it's not her hob. She has a consumer affairs column. The hob belongs to someone who wrote in.

What cute Christmas socks!

The Shedunnit podcast gives interesting background on the epistolary crime novel as a subgenre. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...