To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)

by Connie Willis

“It was a cat, wasn’t it? They’re smaller than I thought they’d be. I thought they’d be more the size of a wolf. And they’re so fast! Were all of them black like that?” “All of them that had been crawling about in a burnt-out cathedral, I should think,” I said. “A real cat!” he said, dusting off his non-AFS coveralls and following me. “It’s just so amazing, seeing a creature that’s been extinct for nearly forty years. I’ve never seen one before.”

nice touch

The nurse flipped the card over. “Tell me what you see.” It appeared to be a postal card of Oxford. Seen from Headington Hill, her dear old dreaming spires and mossy stones, her hushed, elm-shaded quads where the last echoes of the Middle Ages can still be heard, murmuring of ancient learning and scholarly tradition, of—

there wasn’t anyplace to hide but the net. He’d have seen me in the gazebo. I didn’t think—” “Exactly, Miss Kindle,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “You didn’t think.” “What are you going to do?” the calamity said. “Are you going to send it back? You’re going to drown it, aren’t you?”

Miss Kindle on the Kindle

“Darwin, Disraeli, the Indian question, Alice in Wonderland, Little Nell, Turner, Tennyson, Three Men in a Boat, crinolines, croquet—” “Penwipers,” I said. “Penwipers, crocheted antimacassars, hair wreaths, Prince Albert, Flush, frock coats, sexual repression, Ruskin, Fagin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw, Gladstone, Galsworthy, Gothic Revival, Gilbert and Sullivan, lawn tennis, and parasols. There,” he said to the seraphim. “He’s been prepped.”

a great summary of Victorian history

“Have you ever heard of Ensign John Klepperman?” “No, sir.” “World War II. Battle of Midway. The entire bridge of his ship was killed and he had to take over as captain. That’s what wars and disasters do, put people in charge of things they’d never ordinarily be in charge of.

Google this ... doesn't sound right

All history can be reduced to the effects of natural forces acting upon populations. Reduced! The Battle of Monmouth! The Spanish Inquisition! The Wars of the Roses! Reduced to natural forces! And populations! Queen Elizabeth! Copernicus! Hannibal!”

Oxford don. They’re an extinct species, too, unless you count Mr. Dunworthy, who is really too sensible to be eccentric, and I had always felt a bit cheated that I hadn’t been there in the glory days of Jowett and R.W. Roper. Spooner was the most famous, of course, because of his gift for mangling the Queen’s English. He’d told a delinquent student, “You have tasted a worm,” and announced the morning hymn one Sunday as “Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take.”

oxford dons and Spoonerisms

look at Drouét. He hadn’t been anybody either, an illiterate French peasant who normally would never have made it into the history books. Except that Louis the Sixteenth, escaping from France with Marie Antoinette, leaned out the window of his carriage to ask Drouét directions, and then, in one of those minor actions that change the course of history, tipped him a banknote. With his picture on it.

i don't remember ever hearing this story

The weather had affected how many turning points of history, starting with the heavenly wind, the kamikaze that had destroyed the Kublai Khan’s fleet when it tried to invade Japan in the thirteenth century. Gales had scattered the Spanish Armada, a blizzard had determined the outcome of the battle of Towton, fog had diverted the Lusitania into the path of a German U-boat, and a low-pressure front over the forest of Ardennes had nearly lost the Battle of the Bulge for the Allies in World War II. Even good weather could affect history. The Luftwaffe’s raid on Coventry had been successful because of cold, clear weather and a full “bomber’s moon.”

weather in history

The United States President William Henry Harrison had caught cold standing in the rain at his inauguration and died of pneumonia a month later. Peter the Great had caught cold while sighting a ship and died within a week. And not just colds. Henry the Fifth had died of dysentery, and as a result the English lost everything they’d gained at Agincourt. The undefeatable Alexander the Great was defeated by malaria, and the face of the whole continent of Asia changed.

illness sucks.

“Don’t look back! Watch where you’re going!” Terence shouted, which struck me as a bit unfair. “One hand over the other. Keep the trim. No, no, no!” he shouted, gesticulating with the bread in one hand and the milk bottle in the other. “Get forward. Open your knees. Keep her head out. Remember your seat.” There is nothing more helpful than shouted instructions, particularly incomprehensible ones.

lol

the mobcapped old woman behind the counter didn’t know if he had been.

mobcap is a new word to me ...

the barrel full of jumble sale odds and ends Abraham Lincoln had bought for a dollar. But in a chaotic system, anything from a cat to a cart to a cold could be significant, and every point was a crisis point. The barrel had held a complete edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, which Lincoln could never have afforded to buy. They had made it possible for him to become a lawyer.

the ultimate garage sale book buy

“There’s nobody on the river.” Except for a single boat coming up the river toward us with three men in it, all in blazers and mustaches, and with a small dog perched on the bow, looking alertly ahead.

THREE MEN AND A BOAT cameo

It was actually more of a swoon than a faint. She slumped sedately to the flowered carpet, managing to avoid hitting any of the furniture—no small feat since the room contained a large round rosewood table, a small triangular table with a tintype album on it, a mahogany table with a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass dome on it, a horsehair sofa, a damask loveseat, a Windsor chair, a Morris chair, a Chesterfield chair, several ottomans, a writing desk, a bookcase, a knick-knack cabinet, a whatnot, a firescreen, a harp, an aspidistra, and an elephant’s foot.

this may be the funniest science fiction novel i have ever read. wodehousian

it wouldn’t be the first time a miscommunication had affected history. Look at the countless times when a message which had been misunderstood or failed to get through or fallen into the wrong hands had changed the outcome of a battle: Lee’s accidentally dropped plans for Antietam, and the Zimmerman telegram, and Napoleon’s illegible orders to General Ney at Waterloo.

it was the Zimmermann telegram ... i should know

“. . . there is no more admirably educational experience for a young fellow starting out in life than going to stay at a country house under a false name. . . .” P. G. Wodehouse

i love this book

“Good Lord, what’s that?” I was staring at a bed of blindingly yellow rice with strips of flaked white in it. “It’s kedgeree,” she said, putting a small spoonful on her plate. “Curried rice and smoked fish.” “For breakfast?” “It’s an Indian dish. The Colonel’s fond of it.”

yummy

My idea was that we also donate objects that we no longer have any use for, all sorts of things, dishes and bric-a-brac and books, a jumble of things!” I was gazing at her in horror. This was the person who had started it all, the person responsible for all those endless jumble sales I’d been stuck at.

the inventor of the garage sale

“Lord Peter took a nap,” she said. “Harriet watched him sleep, and that’s when she knew she was in love with him.” She sat up again. “Of course I knew it from the second page of Strong Poison, but it took two more books for Harriet to figure it out. She kept telling herself it was all just detecting and deciphering codes and solving mysteries together, but I knew she was in love with him. He proposed in Latin. Under a bridge. After they solved the mystery. You can’t propose till after you’ve solved the mystery.

Anglophilia rules

And I was going to have to face it. No matter how much sleep I got or she didn’t, she was always going to look like a naiad to me. Even lying there with her greenish-brown eyes closed and her mouth half-open, drooling gently onto a mildewed boat cushion, she was still the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

drooling love

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moths corrupt and thieves break in and steal. Matthew 6:19.”

Matt 6.19

The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.

a very thought provoking statement of the situation

” A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

the Grand Design

I handed him the enameled pyx.

great Scrabble word