Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Judgement in Stone with a note of reference.

It has become a bleak house, fit nesting place for the birds that Dickens named Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

Very slowly Giles closed his copy of The Bhagavad Gita which had been propped against the marmalade pot, and with a kind of concentrated lethargy extended himself to his full, emaciated, bony height.

She suffered from what  might be called a Gwendolyn complex, for, like Wilde's Miss Fairfax, she preferred a woman to be "fully forty-two and  more than usually plain for her age."

Melinda Cloverdale, in her room in Galwich, was struggling to make sense out of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Now he was on his way to Sudbury to buy a packet of orange dye.  He was going to dye all his jeans and T-shirts orange in pursuance of his religion, which was, roughly Buddhism. When he had saved up enough money he meant to go to India on a bus, and with the exception of Melinda, never see any of them again.  Well, maybe his mother.  But not his father, or stuffy old George, or self-righteous Peter or this bunch of peasants.  That is, if he didn't become a Catholic instead.  He had just finished reading Brideshead Revisited and had begun to wonder whether being a Catholic at Oxford and burning incense on one's staircase might not be better than India.  But he'd dye the jeans and T-shirts just in case. 

Melinda would be home.  He didn't know whether this was pleasing or disquieting.  On the surface, his relationship with her was casual and even distant, but in Giles's heart, where he often saw himself as a Poe or Byron, it simmered with incestuous passion.

But this was not what Giles wanted or what he saw in his fantasies.  In them Melinda and he were a Byron and an Augusta Leigh who confessed their mutual passion while walking in Wuthering Heights weather on the Greeving Hills, a pastime which nothing would have induced Giles to undertake in reality.

Sweet's Anglo-Saxon and Baugh on the history of the English language weren't so much glanced at for a fortnight, and as for Goethe, Jonathan had found his Elective Affinities elsewhere.