Tag: Shakespeare

A crossword in your ear

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I lashed out this week and shouted* myself a new crossword book as the old one was (more or less) completed and someone had (a) left melted chocolate fingerprints on pages 19 and 20 and (b) the cover and edges of several pages were festooned with the squashed remains of a cockroach which dared to stray too close to the late-night toast and marmalade. After a bit of trial and error, I settled for an…

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Each cliche a cliffhanger

She Who Reads Newspapers: “Dear, it seems a raft of measures has been swept out to sea by a storm of protest.” “Zounds,” I say (exhuming an archaic oath meaning indignation). “That will teach them not to put all their eggs in one basket.” There was a time when a journalist wouldn’t touch a cliché with a barge pole, as Nigel Rees says in the introduction to his book, The Joy of Cliches. We all…

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