1.
The Hotel Oloffson is no more...

The Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, Haiti -- which provided the inspiration for the hotel owned by Brown, the protagonist in Graham Greene's The Comedians -- has been burned down by gangs. It closed in 2022, but there were hopes it would one day reopen. That's obviously going to be a bit more of an ask now. But former manager Richard Morse tries to keep things in perspective: "[In Haiti] so many people are dying and being raped and losing everything that I don’t want the focus to be on the hotel." And he hasn't thrown in the towel: "There’s no life without hope, so we have to consider bringing Haiti back and bringing the hotel back and bringing the art and the culture back."

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2.
We now know how Mary Stuart's "secret" communications were decrypted.

Mary Queen of Scots and Anthony Babington (who headed a plot to put her on the throne of England instead of Elizabeth I) featured in Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time. A trove of Mary's encoded letters was recently discovered, deciphered, and reintegrated with the rest of the corpus of her correspondence. And now it has become clearer exactly how the capacity to code-break led to the unravelling of the plot, and the execution of those involved.

In 1586, Mary was 44 years old, and had been imprisoned for 18 years (partly at South Wingfield Manor). She was forbidden contact with the outside world, but suddenly she secretly receives a bundle of letters. They have have been wrapped in a leather pouch, which has been hidden in the hollow bung used to seal a barrel of beer.

Babington communicates with her via a complex code. Unfortunately for Mary, there's a double agent involved, who's working for Walsingham, a loyal servant of Queen Elizabeth. So all the letters she receives are also seen by other eyes, who also sometimes tamper with them before sending them on to her.

The code that Mary and her supporters are using had to be cracked by one Phelippe. Using painstaking observation and comparison, it would be possible to decipher the code, but the process (without computers) would have taken ages, whereas Phelippe seemed to break it within hours. What kind of decryption genius was he? It turns out the solution is more prosaic. A second double agent had been infiltrated into Mary's company, and he not only designed the coding scheme, but also just happened to be a friend of Phelippe's... "Despite the myth that has been created around her, everything suggests that the Queen of Scotland was more the victim of a trap than of the talents of a codebreaker."


South Wingfield Manor, 2024

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3.
Louisa May Alcott didn't much like Little Women...

What?? Small Prudence's most beloved childhood book disparaged by its creator? This is heresy!!

But it's true. Little Women was both a blessing and a curse. It gave Alcott the financial independence to write full-time, but it also stereotyped her: "Her many readers wanted more about the March sisters, and after so many years working as an unknown writer, she couldn’t resist satisfying her readers’ requests." It might not have been everything she wanted (she frankly admitted: "Though I do not enjoy writing 'moral tales' for the young, I do it because it pays well"), but what a legacy... That book has never been out of print, and has been translated into over 50 languages.

Nor did lack of enthusiasm slow Alcott down. Little Women took her just 2.5 months to complete... Wahhh...

She was "an erratic writer". When caught up in one of her writing bursts, she was full on, missing meals and sleep. She even trained herself to write with her left hand, to give the right one a break... She wrote in the mornings, but often lay awake at night planning out her next chapters, and then writing it all down when she woke up. I can't see that working for everyone...

Like Jo March, the heroine of Little Women, she had a desk set up under the eaves in the attic of the family home. But she also liked to roam the house as she wrote, settling down in any quiet space with an old atlas on her lap in lieu of a desk, and setting up a bolster code to maintain concentration (its position on the sofa conveyed a yes or no as to communication with the family).

Of course, we know she also wrote other things -- A Long Fatal Love Chase, for example, although that wasn't published until long after her death -- so it's probably time to track down some more.


The Chinese version

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4.
Why isn't Jane Austen treated like the satirist she is?

There are apparently a number of women whose writing should qualify as satire (Austen, Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood, Mary Robinson, Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Bronte...), but who are generally missing in the roll calls of satirists (which generally include Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope...)

One reason for the absence of these names is that the associated work has been much less readily available (although a quick search shows that Gutenberg and Internet Archive, those two good old stalwarts, now carry quite a number).

Another reason is that our definition of satire tends to be "coded in masculine language", so that satire is assumed to be aggressive.

"But in Austen and the work of her female contemporaries," says Adam Smith, "we see another kind of satire. The joy of so many of the quips and rejoinders issued by characters like Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet is that often their targets don’t even realise they have been satirised, so subtle is the critique.

"Virginia Woolf said it best when called upon to describe Austen’s juvenilia, in particular her early novel Love and Freindship (sic): 'What is this note, which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of 15 is laughing, in her corner, at the world.'"



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5.
What happened to Agatha Christie when she disappeared?

The famous crime writer (whose very first whodunnit was The Mysterious Affair at Styles) went missing for 11 days in December 1926. She'd had a row with her husband (over his unfaithfulness), and had rushed off in her car. The vehicle was discovered the following day, along with the clothes she'd packed. But no Agatha: "It’s all there, just like in one of her books: the scandalous setup, the spooky mystery, and the clues. What’s missing is the conclusion. Almost a hundred years later, we’re still not certain what happened to her."

Arthur Conan Doyle was wheeled on to help, but given that he conducted a seance rather doing any actual detecting, he must have been something of a disappointment.

Later evidence suggests that she took herself off to London, and eventually ended up in Yorkshire. But there's a gap between those two destinations that's never been accounted for.

Was it a publicity stunt? Or did she suffer a bout of amnesia or a nervous breakdown? We don't know: "The possibilities stretch in many different directions, none of which can be confirmed. If the disappearance was intentional, as many believe, it may be the mystery giant’s greatest success in her field."