Clifford Witting

#2

This is a fascinating collection of hundreds of English proverbial expressions. These include sayings which go back to the very roots of language, quotations from great writers which have become proverbial, and popular phrases which are widely used and known. The compilers not only pithily define and illustrate the proverbs but also trace them back to their origins wherever possible. There are copious cross-references which show how many expressions relate to a common core of folk wisdom. A very full and useful index is also included, and there is a section of biographical details of people mentioned in the book. English-speaking people throughout the world are familiar from infancy with such phrases as 'a stitch in time saves nine' and 'first come first served', but they will find new light shed on these and on less familiar proverbs by the compilers. Those to whom English is a second or foreign language will be greatly helped by the definitions, since proverbial expressions are notoriously bewildering.

#3

It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady, is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger - a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure. The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting's series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder... But can the police disentangle the complicated relationships to discover the real killer? First published in 1941, it was the fifth of Witting's novels.