Philip > Recent Status Updates

Not enjoying this massively, to be honest. Not sure why.

Started this out of order by mistake, because it was before Unnatural Death on my shelf. Damn.

Going to try to reread all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels over the next year or so, including the Jill Paton Walsh continuations. (Though possibly not the short stories.)

Oh God, a British character's just done that thing Americans do of referring to someone as "Sir [Surname]". How can a book research its history so thoroughly but get such basic stuff wrong?

It's a pity that this book's evident attention to detail in the historical setting didn't extend to the language. The Victorian diction is very inconsistent, veering (in the chapter I've just read) from "Adam's spawn" meaning "people" -- absurdly poetical in any century, surely -- to jarringly modern idioms like "risk averse" and "one-year anniversary". This is setting my teeth on edge a bit.