This dynamic of life and death is extended by the fact that Caravaggio often painted the same agasp expression in many of his living faces.

Later that evening she rang me, calling the locum some choice names, including fefnicute. The fefnicute had refused to put a filling in her painful tooth, because, he said, she was under the weather. She said that the word meant a miserable git, a mean, sneaking fellow. It was a Lancashire word she remembered from childhood.

a withdrawn child

There can be little doubt that the autumn-flowering gentians are the elite of late-flowering alpines, but alas they can only be enjoyed by those gardeners with an acid soil, unless they can be grown in containers.