Downstairs in the kitchen Phil always had a box or two of Batchelors marrowfat dried peas soaking in a bucket together with a sodium tablet, which he would transform the next day into a grey-green lumpy mass of 'Yorkshire caviar', the humble but delicious mush of peas served with mint sauce and vinegar.

Crepon cloths, with their heavy crape-like wale, are a noteworthy part of the season's importations.

Thanks to his [Athanasius Kircher's] Polyhedric interests – philosophy, history, science among them –, the study of perspective and geometry in general was introduced in unusual fields such as cosmometry, astronomy, orography, scenic design, and many others.

So many successful matches were made up here last winter, that it has encouraged all the bedaughtered dowagers to bring their unsaleable commodities to the Roman market, which is now so completely overstocked, that, like a swarm of locusts, they must die of the famine they have themselves created.