Sam Redlark

  image generated by Grok On the 14 th of August, 2013, a man calling himself Peter Koller wrote cryptically in the birthdays section of The Telegraph : “Pavimenti is 125 years old and living proof that the secret of preserving mental acuity in old age lies in a handful of loosely connected words, alluded to in anger.” Pavimenti is not, as is implied by Koller, the oldest surviving person in Great Britain. They are a composite, created during the late 1880s by the seven men who compiled the midweek Highgate Tree Puzzle for the Whitehall Clarion . The newspaper, which still exists, has a solid reputation for foreign correspondence. It was distributed nationally up until 1945. The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a gradual withdrawal from provincial newsagents. Despite its shrinking footprint, it has adhered to a publishing schedule of six daily issues (there is no Saturday edition). It is now sold exclusively for £2 from a single kiosk, located at the halfway...

image by Grok   James Bond's unsuccessful attempt at giving up cigarettes forms a minor plot point in Patrick Redinger's short story – A Matter of Proportion . As a rule the character either smokes, or does not smoke, according to the whims of his handler. At the time of writing this is the author John Evoy (a pro-smoker), thought to be a pseudonym of Douglas Maskey, who is better known for his historical epics set against a backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. As a thought experiment, let us imagine for a moment that we have managed to drug the fictional James Bond, perhaps using a dart coated with a rare South American poison, fired from the tip of a customised umbrella; the kind that is only sold by a small family-run shop in Kiev. Let us assume that, having rendered this version of Bond unconscious, we have the power to set in motion the most extraordinary of all extraordinary renditions, removing him from the pages of the novels that bear his name and transplanting him into th...