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11:57am Thursday 1st May 2008
James Conan is the pen-name for a collaboration between Duncton Chronicles creator William Horwood and historian Helen Rappaport, whose novel City of Dark Hearts (Arrow, £6.99) is set in 1890s Chicago.
Helen is an expert on black Crimean nurse Mary Seacole, while William has written four sequels to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and a semi-fictional memoir, The Boy With No Shoes.
One of the pictures on this page gives a good impression of the delights to be enjoyed at the Mole and Chicken on one of those sunny days that now seem as far as can be from our present situation.
Next week is The Oxford Times Wine Club Christmas Tasting and, with just four weeks to go until Christmas Day, it is an excellent opportunity to sample a specially-selected range of wines for the festive season.
‘I was the first person to discover that if you infected a person with Marmite, he would stand up and bark at the moon.” “Everybody under the age of 35 has the intelligence of raspberry jam.” “Children can hear vegetables hiding.”
There’s nothing King Couer-de-Loup likes more than a good battle: “We’ll march on King Florizel’s wet and wicked army,” he proclaims. His Queen is not so sure, however. She would rather her husband stayed around: there’s the christening of their daughter Princess Aurora to arrange for a start. And he certainly can’t go out and fight looking like that: “Your chain mail’s got a ladder in it,” she wails.
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