The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

by Alan Bradley

We were seated round the long refectory table, Father at the far end, Daffy and Feely one on each side, and me at the very bottom, at Cape Horn.

As we tore along through lanes and hedgerows, Clarence worked the gear stick like a snake charmer grappling with a wilful cobra, seizing its head every few seconds and shoving it to some new quarter of the compass.

Before she had married Father, Harriet had piloted her own de Havilland Gipsy Moth, which she had named Blithe Spirit, and I sometimes imagined her floating alone up there in the sunshine, dipping in and out of the puffy valleys of cumulus, with no one to answer to except the wind.

we de Luces are Roman Catholics—we are in fact, virtually charter members of the club. We have seen our share of bobbing and ducking. But we regularly attend St. Tancred’s because of its proximity, and because the vicar is one of Father’s great friends. “Besides,” Father says, “it is one’s bounden duty to trade with local firms.”

Samuel Pepys,

Mrs. Mullet guarded the kitchen like a Foo Dog at the tomb of a Chinese emperor,

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one’s attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.

“What did Flaubert mean,” I asked at last, “when he said that Madame Bovary gave herself up to Rodolphe?” “He meant,” Dogger said, “that they became the greatest of friends. The very greatest of friends.”