But too often it reads like the second-rate movies that in the ’60s tried to cash in on the Bond success, the Matt Helm and Derek Flint pictures in which 007’s cool was reduced to swinging bachelor squaresville, a place where it was believed that all the right accouterments — the right stereo system, the right booze, the right sex — equaled style and wit.
The second-most-common phobia is ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes. Ophidiophobia is one of the most debilitating fears in humans; even the picture of a snake in a magazine or image of one on TV can invoke intense fear in some people.
That large room had always awed Ivor: even as a child he had never wanted to play in it, for all that it was so limitless, the parquet floor so vast and shiny and unencumbered, the windows so wide and light with the fairy expanse of Kensington Gardens.
The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries. It had always been that way. Indeed, there were several eminent linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated.
