Lighter reading

A pre-World War I murder mystery is solved, and the length of local memories in a French village revealed. (It is in the end, however, a rather common story - two blokes have a fight in a bar over a woman.)The killer's family always knew, and you get the feeling the village had a pretty good idea, but nobody was going to tell the local gendarme, the representative of outside authority anything. Or maybe he was in on what happened, but wasn't going to make it official.

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If you think you've got an "odd-shaped" body, it is not you at fault, but the clothes manufacturers. Although I don't get the fact that I do actually meet their technical definition of an "hour-glass figure", but I still can't get trousers that fit. (If they fit at the hips, the waist is usually 10cm or more too big - don't know what I'm going to do when hipster jeans disappear, as the ridiculous fashion cycle rolls on.)

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Even the Right is worried about Mailization of the British media. (To which I made reference yesterday.) Sir Peregrine Worsthorne writes in the Independent today about the Telegraph:

"What we are in danger of getting is not the revival of a newspaper which represented English conservatism at its nicest - as the Daily Telegraph was when Bill Deedes served as its editor rather than its fig leaf - but rather a cloned new version of the Daily Mail which represents English conservatism at its very nastiest. A double dose of the Daily Mail poison, could the English body politic really survive that?"

(Both of those Independent links will only work for a couple of days - sorry - due to the incredibly shortsighted policy it has of putting everything behind a paywall. Which is why I don't often link to it.)