pplpod

Christmas at Duke's Denver begins badly when Mrs. Dimsworthy asks Lord Peter Wimsey over tea whether he is defending 'that frightful poisoning woman'. Captain Tommy Bates condemns Philip Boyes's books from a newspaper excerpt, Miss Titterton would commute Harriet's sentence for a new novel every six months, and Mr. Harringay cites Madeleine Smith as proof that an arsenic poisoner can make a good w...

Over breakfast Norman Urquhart shows Lord Peter Wimsey the draft of Mrs. Wrayburn's will and explains the family tree. John Hubbard, a Nottingham banker, lost everything and left three daughters: Jane, whose line produced Philip Boyes; Mary, Urquhart's grandmother; and Rosanna, who ran away to the stage as Cremorna Garden, took money, jewels, and carriages from fashionable London, and turned it al...

At Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Parker introduces Lord Peter Wimsey to Mrs. Bulfinch, once Miss Montague of the saloon bar at the Nine Rings in Gray's Inn Road. Around the longest day, at about five past ten by a clock kept fast, a white faced young man stumbled in, asked for a double brandy, said he had had a shock that upset his gastric trouble, and stirred a white powder into water with a fou...

Bunter turns a delivered note into a tea invitation and sits in Norman Urquhart's kitchen toasting crumpets with the cook Mrs. Pettican and the parlourmaid Hannah Westlock. They relive Philip Boyes's final illness: the hot water bottles, the greenish colour, the agonising cramps that Nurse Williams said she had seen only once before. Hannah remembers pins and needles in his hands and feet during h...

Lord Peter Wimsey sends Bunter to charm his way into Norman Urquhart's kitchen, where the parlourmaid Hannah Westlock and the cook hold what Wimsey needs. Bunter first surprises his master by asking whether he plans changes to the household, having correctly guessed the lady in question. Wimsey then enlists Marjorie Phelps, who makes figurines and porcelain, to guide him through the studio parties...

Back at Holloway, Lord Peter Wimsey asks Harriet Vane whether Philip Boyes ever made a will. She says he did, in her favour, while they lived together, mostly to name a literary executor, and adds that she was earning four times what he did. Wimsey then floats a 'plot' for a detective story: a crime novelist kills her writer friend with the method from her latest book so both their works become be...

Lord Peter Wimsey drives to Tweedling Parva to see the Reverend Arthur Boyes, a faded, gentle clergyman who admits he never met Harriet Vane and has grave doubts she is guilty. He shows Wimsey his son's letters: one cheerfully announcing that he would 'regularize the situation' at a registrar's office, the next reporting that the wedding was off and that Harriet had made a fool of herself and him....

Lord Peter Wimsey sits down to tea with Miss Climpson in the office of what looks like a typing bureau. Upstairs, a staff of spinsters, widows, retired schoolteachers, and out of work actresses answer advertisements from matrimonial swindlers and shady financiers, and the frauds tend to end up before a magistrate. The bureau has a private telephone line to Scotland Yard and runs on Wimsey's money;...

The day after the hung jury, Sir Impey Biggs holds a Sunday council of war with Lord Peter Wimsey and the solicitor Mr. Crofts. Wimsey explains exactly how the jury split: Miss Climpson with her militant high church conscience, a sweet shop owner who has buried her third husband and distrusts all medical evidence, and an artist who thought Philip Boyes a conceited prig. The defence has about a mon...

With the summing up over, the court settles in to wait for a verdict that everyone assumes will take twenty minutes. The reporters Waffles Newton and Salcombe Hardy worry about missing the evening editions, while Lord Peter Wimsey tells Chief Inspector Parker flatly that he has made a mistake and the girl is innocent. The Dowager Duchess, who has been reading one of Harriet Vane's novels, remarks...

The judge resumes his summing up with Philip Boyes's final days. On June 22 his skin peeled from his lips, and in front of his father and Nurse Williams he said: 'Harriet will be rid of me now. I didn't know she hated me quite so much.' He died at three in the morning on June 23, and the doctors, finding the symptoms matched his old gastric trouble, signed a certificate of acute gastritis. It was...

Strong Poison opens in a courtroom where crimson roses sit on the bench and an aged judge sums up for the jury. Harriet Vane, a 29 year old writer of detective stories, stands accused of murdering her former lover Philip Boyes, a 36 year old author of five novels preaching atheism, anarchy, and free love. They met in 1927, lived together from March 1928, and quarrelled in February 1929 when Boyes,...

Carved into the sandstone cliffs of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, the Western Buddha stood 55 meters tall and the Eastern Buddha 38 meters. Their robes were modeled in mud, straw, and stucco over wooden pegs, the upper faces were likely wooden masks, and the larger figure was painted carmine red. Carbon dating of organic material exposed after 2001 dates the Eastern Buddha to 544 to 595 CE and the...

William Beckford inherited a fortune in 1771 at about age ten, with an income estimated at 100,000 pounds a year from sugar plantations in Jamaica, and newspapers called him the richest commoner in England. In 1784 the first Baron Loughborough publicly accused him of an improper relationship with a boy named William Courtenay. The allegations were never proven in court, but society shut him out. H...

At 829.8 meters, the Burj Khalifa is tall enough that residents above the 150th floor break their Ramadan fast about three minutes after those at street level, because they can still see the sun. Dubai under Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum built it as a global billboard for diversifying away from oil, and a brief first inspired by Seoul's Tower Palace 3 grew into the anchor of the two square...

The first geodesic dome was not Buckminster Fuller's. Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer at Carl Zeiss in Jena, Germany, built a lightweight triangulated dome on the factory roof after World War I to house a new planetarium projector, and a larger public version opened in July 1926 as the Wonder of Jena. Fuller, working with artist Kenneth Snelson in the late 1940s, coined the term geodesic, secur...

No building in Yangon may rise above 127 meters above sea level, a limit set in deference to the Shwedagon Pagoda. The solid brick stupa sits on Singuttara Hill, about 51 meters up, and rises another 112 meters, covered in gold plates attached with rivets and topped by an umbrella crown set with 5,448 diamonds, 2,317 rubies, and a single 76 carat diamond at the tip. Legend says the merchant brothe...

Proposals to cross Sydney Harbour began in 1814, when convict architect Francis Greenway pitched a bridge to Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and continued through a floating bridge idea in 1840 and design competitions in 1900 and 1902. Norman Selfe's winning cantilever design was scrapped after a change of government in 1904. Chief engineer John Bradfield revived the project after World War I, with hi...

The Atomium is a 102 meter structure on the Heysel Plateau in Laeken, Brussels, built as the centerpiece of Expo 58. Engineer André Waterkeyn and architects André and Jean Polak modeled it on a single unit cell of an alpha iron crystal, a body-centered cubic lattice with nine atoms, magnified 165 billion times. Foundations went in during March 1956 and the structure was finished less than a month...

New Kingdom pharaohs abandoned the pyramid and hid their tombs in a remote wadi on the west bank of the Nile, beneath the peak of al-Qurn, a mountain shaped naturally like a pyramid. The valley's layers of limestone, marl, and shale made it a treacherous place to dig: when rain reached the shale it swelled and sheared the rock apart, and Setnakht's crews tunneled into an older tomb by accident. Th...

Around 2600 BC, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Sneferu set out at Dahshur to replace the stepped pyramids of rulers like Djoser with a true smooth-sided pyramid, reflecting a shift toward the solar cult and the benben mound of creation. His builders began with a 157 meter base and a slope of 58 to 60 degrees, then widened the base to 188 meters and dropped to 54 degrees with inward-leaning layers. At...

In 1996 Southwark Council and RIBA Competitions sought a new pedestrian crossing over the Thames, and a team of Arup, Foster and Partners, and sculptor Anthony Caro won with a blade of light. Linking Bankside to the City of London, the bridge frames the south facade of St. Paul's Cathedral, so tall suspension towers were ruled out. Instead the cables run below the deck, pulled taut with 2,000 tons...

In 1865, as the American Civil War ended, French historian Édouard de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, proposed at a dinner near Versailles that France and the United States build a monument to American independence and democracy. Under Napoleon III, praising American liberty was a way to criticize French rule without saying so. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi reworked...

A true gargoyle is a water spout: if water does not pour through a trough in its back and out of its mouth, it is a grotesque, a chimera, a boss, or in some regions a hunky punk. The word comes from the Old French gargouille and the root garg, meaning throat, the same root as gargle. Legend says the seventh century bishop Saint Romanus subdued a winged, fire-breathing dragon called the Gargouille...

Long before the Mughals, the ridge at Sikri held a settlement dating to the sixth century. Excavations at Bir Chhabili Tila uncovered brick walls, writing tablets, glass bangles, game pieces, a sculpture of the Jain goddess Ambika with a Brahmi inscription, and a Jain Sarasvati statue installed in 1010 that names the town Sikrikya. The Sikarwar Rajputs held the area until the Battle of Khanwa in 1...