Travellers’ Library, 1931, 315 p

This is a collection of poems and short stories set in Ancient Greece among the wars between Athens and Sparta. The stories range in date from 500 BC, to 498 BC, 461 BC, 456 BC, 446 BC, 427 BC, 415 BC, 412 BC, 399 BC, 396 BC, 374 BC and finally 373 BC. A few of the poems directly relate to those times but a couple are not so specific.

We start things off with two poems and then each story is followed by a single poem until the last, designated as a song.

Mitchison’s usual facility as a writer is in evidence. There is nothing particularly startling in the contents and she seems to know these times well though bearing her research lightly, but then she did cover similar ground in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and set other books in ancient times: The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Travel Light, Blood of the Martyrs.

She is perhaps strongest when focusing on relationships involving women – the one where one man deceives an ingenuous young girl for his own ends could resonate still, women’s care for each other is displayed but not overly stressed – though those between men are also given weight, in the title story an act of kindness which could be seen as treason being neatly resolved.

While the Ancient Greeks reverence for poetry is not mirrored nowadays there is no reason to suppose human nature two and a half thousand years ago was any different to today. These stories could underline that perfectly.

Pedant’s corner:- shrunk (shrank,) “Hippokleas’ shoulder” (Hippokleas’s: all names ending in s are given s’ as their possessive rather than s’s,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “by and bye” (‘by and by’ as it was rendered later,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of dialogue (x 2.)

Granada, 1980, 138 p

In an unspecified Central American country, a group of men are planning a revolution to restore General Jorge Alvarez to the Presidency. He had been allowed back in to the country after his successor, a mathematics professor named Ospina, decided to curry favour with the US and so promised elections.

The main conspirators are the General, his son José, his friend Peter Nelson, not long ago court-martialled from the US Army (a fact he doesn’t wish to conceal but also doesn’t advertise,) a Frenchman called Charles de Cluny, Colonel Aranha, and priest Father Miguel. They have the backing of the Company of Mr Green, a US citizen whose son George is engaged to the General’s daughter, Elena. Without that support and the implicit promise of US approval the revolution would not be possible.

Elena attracts Nelson’s interest. She decries his description of her father as a former dictator, saying he did good things for the country and the people. She in turn takes a fancy to Nelson, who contemplates sex with Elena thus, “The beast with two backs had still two brains and two identities and it was neither possible nor desirable to fuse them, to lose identity. The act made a momentary union, an instant of sharing, of identification, but this passed in a single second to be recalled later as pleasure and little more. The religion of union was a female doctrine, a false dream, possible only at the risk of sanity: a hypnotic state where reality was replaced for a time by a destructive vision.” (I did wonder if this line of thought was occasioned by the author’s homosexuality.)

Nelson is charged with the training of General Alavarez’s army (rudimentary training at best.) The revolution goes ahead in the country’s second city and Nelson is involved in the fighting. While that goes well enough news from the capital is not so good, with betrayal on top of betrayal and the influence of the Company not what the conspirators had hoped.

Vidal is here explicitly critiquing the US Government’s tendency to interfere in other countries’ affairs; not necessarily to their benefit.

Pedant’s corner:- “General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’ house (General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’s house; or maybe even ‘General Jorge Alvarez’s Asturias house’,) “‘You can see if from the street’” (‘see it from’,) a missing comma – or full stop – before a piece of direct speech, gulley (gully; as it was spelled later,) “(I’d even been in school with them, danced with some of them!).” (an exclamation mark doesn’t need a full stop following it,) a gap between a colon and the preceding word (x 2.) “José unbuttoned his shirt and lay in the sun, eyes shut. A small scapula glittered on the dark pink chest” (how can a shoulder blade lie on a chest?) “Aristophanes’ The Birds” (Aristophanes’s,) an end quotation mark follows a paragraph of speech which is carried on on the next line. The convention is no such mark is required in those circumstances.) “‘Then what do you think about our chances.’” (is a question and so requires a question mark,) two lines of the text were transposed. “‘They wanted to get back him’” (wanted to get him back.) “She shut here eyes” (her eyes,) de rigeur (de rigueur,) “sounded strange on his own ears” (in his own ears.)

Vintage, 2023, 343 p

Lux was brought up by her mother in a house by the forest. Her mother was a healer and maker of poppets and possets, subject to suspicion because her baby had arrived suddenly with no man on the scene. Her mother gone, and Lux returned to the house after a sojourn in a sanctuary subject to strict religious rules, she is living alone when a woman, Else, arrives seeking her help to poison the local lord “‘who calls women witches so that he has an excuse to kill them.’” That same night Lux’s house is attacked by some of the local boys. They are driven off by a wolf, which may be Else in transfigured form, but not before the house is set on fire. Lux and Else set off together into the forest. The rest of the tale follows both – but mainly Lux – until she eventually finds employment in the lord’s castle, with Else tending to the herb/poison garden, and their misadventures there. I note here that Logan attributes to the lady of the manor more agency than a woman in her situation is likely to have had.

After a “Before” prologue which is unpunctuated (apart from dashes) and printed in italics and with no capital letters, the story is told in five parts. Parts One and Three have section titles all beginning with “Now She Is” followed by one word (in order these were Outcast, Prey, Maiden, Servant, Sacrifice, Whore, Poisoner.)

Part Two is “Lux’s Story” and is given to us also unpunctuated and printed in italics with no capital letters (apart from the words He and Him when describing the lover she had in the sanctuary.) Part Four, “Else’s story,” was similarly unpunctuated but had capital letters where appropriate.

Part Five’s sections have no titles and are in numbered order.

We are here, though, firmly in default faux-mediæval fantasy territory though there is some additional colour, a land bridge between the south and the north, the sea rising, there has been fire in the sky, poison vapours, ash, a sickness spreading supposedly from the north, whose sign is black roses on the skin.

Logan’s almost relentless theme is man’s inhumanity to woman.  “Women are, as Father Fleck used to tell them at the sanctuary, less intelligent, more suggestible, and have more entry points into their bodies. All those orifices ready for a devil to creep into.” In Else’s story she tells Lux “it turns out all that really matters in this world is what a man wants because you either give it to him or he takes it and gives nothing in return” but “Beauty is dangerous. Beauty has power. Beauty has violence.” She outlines “the only available options, Maiden, Wife, Nun, Widow,” adding, “And I could not be any of these even if I wanted to. But there is one other option for a woman and it is the worst of all. Witch. Witch. Witch.”

The plot unfolds slowly to the point where we find the reason for Else’s attachment to Lux.

I suppose it is difficult to write in a contemporary setting a story about the best option for a woman being a witch but I’m really tired of tales such as this adopting a historical template.

On a sentence level Logan is good and her characterization is more than adequate. The whole thing seemed a little bit by the numbers though.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jesus’ birth” (Jesus’s,) “her tongue would not lay still” (would not lie still,) “aren’t I?” (Logan is Scottish; the correct usage is “amn’t I?”)

Collins, 1950, 510 p, including 2 p Note, 3 p Contents and 4p list of Characters.

This is the second of Barke’s Immortal Memory sequence chronicling the life of Robert Burns. He is now in young adulthood and has moved to the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, with brother Gilbert and the rest of his family. We meet Jean Armour before Burns does, and she is presented as an obedient, dutiful daughter.

Burns is in trouble with the local minister, known as Daddy Auld. He has already fathered a child to Betty Paton, but his penance for this, on the cutty stool, takes place in the nearby parish of Tarbolton since that is where the offence occurred. He was fined one guinea and his sin considered absolved. (This strikes me as akin to those indulgences of the Catholic Church which so enraged the early Protestant reformers.) It is his poems and intellect which most worry Auld, however, who realizes that the best way to undermine Burns will be through his sexual misdemeanours. To that end he enjoins two of his elders, Willie Fisher and James Lamie, to collect evidence against Burns. Fisher is that hypocritical individual about whom Burns would write Holy Willie’s Prayer. (Another long poem, about Mauchline’s Holy Fair, also excites Auld’s ire.)

Burns and his cronies disparage these prurient creatures as the houghmagandie pack, and the fascination of the Church with controlling sexuality (which seems to be the goal of all religions) is noted. “Auld had long been made aware of the peculiar fact that when any of the congregation had to appear on the sessional carpet for a sexual offence, he could count on a full attendance from his lay-shepherds. No other sin so excited their holy zeal for probing into the mystery of the passionate relationship between man and woman and the theological relationship between both and the Presbyterian conception of God.”

When Burns meets Jean he is immediately smitten (though he does have a weakness for imagining himself in love.) Jean’s father dislikes him on reputation alone and has already forbidden her to have anything to do with him. But the attraction is too strong for both of them and she and Burns sign a paper to the effect that they have married. This is without benefit of clergy but would apparently have been recognised legally. He is too poor to support a wife though. The song in the green thorn tree of the book’s title is the one Jean sings at their trysting site.

The inevitable happens and Jean’s father and mother prevail on her to disown him, paper or no. Incensed, Burns turns to Highland Mary (Campbell) for solace and resolves to leave for the Caribbean, arranging a passage for himself and Mary whom he dispatches to Greenock to hide her pregnancy. Some boy, as they say.

In the meantime his poem some of which Barke has Burns conjure up on the spot, have been gaining a reputation and it is arranged for a book of his poetry (Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect) to be published by subscription, or at least promise of payment. He wrestles over which verses to publish as some may be considered too controversial, publishers then, as now, reluctant to take too much of a risk.

Barke’s writing is workmanlike, with occasional veerings into purple prose when describing landscape. Several of the quoted poems have their verses written as speech which detracts from the ability to read them as poems but since Burns was reciting them to others I suppose that’s fair enough. The characterisation is broad brush.

I note that the Church’s strictures against houghmagandie seem to have been spectacularly unsuccessful as several instances of compearing are mentioned in the book – including that of a couple who married before the evidence blossomed, though their marriage did not in any way mitigate the offence. When Burns has to stand for his “fornication” with Jean Armour there is no room on the cutty stool. He is one of five people, including Jean, arraigned on the same day.

Pedant’s corner:- Barke still spells the town Machlin rather than Mauchline, “womankind were crowding in” (womankind is singular; ‘womankind was crowding in’.) Surgeoners! (it was possessive not plural; ‘Surgeoner’s!’,) “knit his brows” (knitted.) “The company were soon in a grand mood” (The company was soon in a grand mood,) staunched (stanched.)

Penguin, 2004, 237 p.

One day Glyn Peters finds in his papers an envelope with his dead wife Kath’s handwriting on it, reading, “Don’t Open. Destroy.”

But who can follow such an instruction? Not Glyn. Fatefully he opens it. And there is the photograph. Of five people, two with their backs to the camera. Kath and a man, holding hands out of view of the other three. And the man is Kath’s brother-in-law Nick. There is also a note saying, “I can’t resist sending you this. Negative destroyed, I’m told. Blessings my love,” in what Glyn assumes is Nick’s hand

Glyn is immediately sent into a tail-spin, examining his past life for clues about his marriage, and into a quest for the truth about the affair, and who knew about it.

He starts with Kath’s sister, Elaine, a (very) successful garden designer, who already has beefs with the rather shiftless Nick, whom she throws out. Their daughter Polly, who had adored Kath, finds that something of an over-reaction, especially since Nick dumps himself on her and makes little effort to find a place of his own, despite her increasingly urgent promptings.

The story is told via several points of view, Glyn, Elaine, Nick, Polly, Nick’s erstwhile business partner Oliver, from whom we learn that “being a woman enabled her” (Kath) “to sail through life, setting her own course, following mood and fancy. Because she was a startlingly attractive woman.”  She had once been asked what it was like to be pretty but she laughed it off. But she had also asked Oliver if he was happy.

Clues begin to build that the characters’ knowledge of Kath needs revising; memories of her close relationship with Polly, the fact that she got on well with children generally. “She has become some mythical figure, trawled up at will to fit other people’s narratives. Everyone has their way with her, everyone decides what she was, how things were.”

The marriage with Glyn wasn’t close, both spent time on their own business, Glyn with his landscape expeditions, Kath on various projects of her own.

It’s not until Glyn meets with Kath’s friend Mary Packard, perhaps the only one who really knew her for who she was, that the full tragic picture becomes clearer, but this is withheld from us till late in the book. But, of course, this is when Glyn speaks with her properly for the first time.

At the end Oliver thinks about how something always set Kath apart. “Behind and beyond her looks, her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it back then. …. All you saw was her face.”

The different characters’ narratives – some rendered as one half of a dialogue – are all distinctive and compelling, revealing of their flaws and misapprehensions.

The Photograph is a demonstration of how difficult it is to truly know someone, even someone close to us, how impossible it is to detect their inner struggles, especially if we do not recognise the clues.

Pedant’s corner:- “squares and triangles and rectangles and oblongs” (A square is a special case of a rectangle so that’s fine; but an oblong is any non-square rectangle, so is not different from a rectangle that isn’t a square,) “Glyn Peters’ appointment” (Peters’s,) “regale lilies” (usually written as ‘regal lilies’, though the botanical name is lilium regale.) “‘Didn’t Kath use to go to…’” (Didn’t Kath used to go to…,)

Gollancz, 1963, 190 p. Translated from the Russian, Один день Ивана Денисовича, (Novy Mir, Moscow, Nov 1962), by Ralph Parker.

I bought this many (many) moons ago but had resisted reading it so far it as I thought the subject matter may have been too depressing. Reading about life in a labour camp is not overly appealing after all. It was still familiar, though. There are many similarities here to Primo Levi’s account, If This Is a Man, of being in Auschwitz.

Despite those reservations I found One Day (as the book’s spine has it) remarkably readable – a testament to the original writing and to the translation. This is also true of Levi’s books.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been imprisoned for ten years in effect for being captured by the Germans. The main aim is to get through each day with as little friction or attention as possible. This particular day starts with Shukhov feeling unwell and thinking of reporting to the sick-bay but the day’s quota of the ill has been filled and he has to return to work.

He is in the 104^th squad and, despite the novel being relatively short, the relationships between its members are carefully illustrated. Even (especially?) given his circumstances he still takes pride in doing a job well (today’s is brick laying which can be tricky as the mortar is liable to freeze) – though it helps that if seen to do so they may get extra food – Shukhov is careful to savour, or husband and hide for later, each item of food.

There are petty indignities such as the incessant counting at roll-calls to be endured, the fact that even thoughts aren’t free as they always cycle back to the same things. Each small achievement, that extra item of food, the finding of a piece of metal which might be fashioned into a knife, is a victory, but you must never set your sights beyond what is in front of you.

Pedant’s corner:- “sleepy heads propped again their rifles” (against, surely?) “fivefifty grams” (fifty five? [And grammes if we’re British],) “tommy-funs at the ready” (tommy-guns,) [this next was in a footnote] “a percentage of the plan t amounts to” (of the plan it amounts to,) a missing end quotation mark at the finish of a piece of dialogue.

Grafton, 1992, 414 p.

Sadly not a book about last season’s FA Cup winners nor indeed the building erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (subsequently moved to Sydenham in 1852 before it was destroyed by fire in the 1930s) and after which that football club was named. Neither is the palace built of crystal, nor even glass. Instead, it’s an ice palace, built in the realm of Ice from a seed planted by the demon Regneniel.

Though Cray, son of sorceress Delivev Ormoru of Castle Spinweb, familiar from Eisenstein’s previous book Sorcerer’s Son, is the nominal protagonist of this sequel, it is actually Aliza, Cray’s heart’s desire as revealed in the mirrored web constructed by his friend Feldar Sepwin, around whom it revolves. After many viewings where he saw nothing in the mirror, she first appeared to him as a girl, then over the years grew into a young woman. Only much searching in the realms of Air, Water, Fire and Ice (each realm has its own kind of demon) by Cray’s mother’s demon lover, Gildrum – not a hyperbolic description, Gildrum is literally a demon in this scenario, but that does not necessarily mean he is demonic – finds Aliza’s location in the titular Crystal Palace. It is effectively a prison where she has been placed by her grandfather Everand, a minor sorcerer, to be taught to be a great sorceress by Regneniel whom she believes to be under her control but is really beholden to Everand. This involved Everand removing Aliza’s soul and hiding it somewhere in the palace.

Prior to the book’s opening Cray had freed as many demons as he could from their enslavement to their masters. For a certain kind of sorcerer this made him their enemy. Everand did not need Cary’s interest in Aliza to feel animosity towards him.

Everand is, though, an unsatisfactory antagonist, too one-dimensional and blinkered to be any sort of foil for Cray and his chums.

I only really read this one as I had already read Sorcerer’s Son. I prefer Eisenstein’s stories of Alaric the Minstrel to these ones.

Pedant’s corner:- Nothing to report.

Polygon, 2023, 187 p.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales.

One summer day in 825 AD the red sail of Helgi Cleanshirt’s longship appears on the seas surrounding Iona. Helgi is intent on procuring the bones of Saint Columba for their supposed mystic powers. It turns out only one relic, a finger bone, remains, but Abbot Blathmac has buried it somewhere on the island’s only hill, Dùn Ì, so that none of the brothers can reveal its whereabouts. This, of course, does not end well for the monks and the lay people of the island.

While the rest of the longship’s crew is causing mayhem, the slightly tardy Grimur has come upon the island’s smithy, killed the blacksmith (somewhat luckily,) and been plied with her potent concoction by the meadwife. In his subsequent stupor he is taken for dead by his shipmates and buried.

There are thus only three survivors of the raid: Brother Martin, who hid in the latrine pit, that meadwife, Una, who had made herself scarce, and Grimur, who, on wakening, manages to dig himself out of the shallow grave with his knife.

The three then have to make do as best they can. Martin resolves to be the best monk he can be and to complete the illuminated manuscript he had been working on, Grimur to rub along with the other two and to understand the strange religion of the islanders, Una to survive. What livestock remains has to roam the island more or less untended.

When a delegation from the mainland arrives the three are told they cannot be protected and ought to leave but all are unwilling to do so.

Later, an Irish princess, Bronagh, turns up, attempting to escape an unwanted marriage and asking to become an anchoress. Brother Martin complies with her request but finds her presence a sinful distraction. Bronagh soon enough, though, finds the monastic life too irksome. Una and Grimur manage to find solace in each other.

We are, here, in a clash of cultures; between the single-minded focus of the Norse warriors, exploiting the usefulness of their brutality, and the Christianity of the monks, that intense faith manifested in the face of extreme adversity, exemplified by Grimur’s incomprehension of its sheer oddness and Martin’s redoubling of his devotion despite its failure to protect the monks; but also between that Celtic Christianity, its call to utter dedication, and our modern individualistic eyes. Greig conjures it all well. Like all the Darkland Tales so far this is beautifully written, with economically well-drawn and believable characters.

There is still Helgi Cleanshirt’s return to come, the aftermath of which hints that there may have been a miracle occurring on that island in the interim.

(A foreword mentions that Iona has previously been known as I, IO, HII, HIA, IOUA. IOUA was in the 18^th century corrupted to IONA by a typographical error.)

Pedant’s corner:- gulley (gully – used later,) “his prophesy” (the noun is spelled prophecy; prophesy is the verb,) “He wanted …. to dissolve in the enormity of God” (surely Brother Martin would not think of his God as monstrous? ‘He wanted …. to dissolve in the immensity of God’, then,) “Jesus’ head” (Jesus’s head.)

Four Square, 1963, 157 p.

This is a collection of Simak’s stories from the 1950s, with one from 1960, and they show their age. The connecting thread of the book is that each story features aliens of one sort or another.

In Dusty Zebra things start disappearing from narrator Joe’s desk and other things appear. Joe ends up trading with the unknown entity on the other side of what it seems is an interdimensional portal. All goes well; until it doesn’t.

Honourable Opponent sees a military delegation from Earth’s Galactic Confederacy awaiting the arrival of their counterparts from a species known as the Fivers, whose weapons have been overwhelmingly devastating, to oversee a prisoner exchange. There is a twist to the meeting when it comes.

Idiot’s Crusade has a village idiot suddenly comprehending things he had not until his mind was infiltrated by an alien; but the alien finds the experience less than congenial.

Operation Stinky occurs in the aftermath of a skunk-like animal (later dubbed Stinky) befriending a farmer whose life has been disrupted by the building of a nearby air-force base. When the air-force colonel discovers Stinky has the ability to improve machinery the secret operation of the title is started up. Stinky has its own agenda, however.

A group of interstellar scavengers searches for the Jackpot of the second last story’s title and finds it in a comprehensive library with an immersive access experience. The process changes them. One of the group justifies their activities by citing historical precedent for exploitation, “They didn’t worry much about the law or ethics of it and no-one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it.”

In Neighbour a newcomer arrives in a small farming area and has sustained success on the farm he and his family have taken over. His machines work by themselves and he has rain and sun when required. His benign influence gradually extends to the neighbourhood as a whole. It is eventually noticed elsewhere. The text displays that mistrust of government embedded in much of US society – especially the rural US.

Pedant’s corner:- swop (swap,) “Alf Adams’ place” (Adams’s,) “and and could find none” (only one ‘and’ needed,) “how I’d lay awake at night (how I’d lie awake,) “when one of the new ones up and moves away (ups and moves away.)

NewCon Press, 2024, 213 p. Reviewed for ParSec 12.

The pitch for this post-apocalypse novel must have written itself. “Lord of the Flies – with girls.” Job done. Don’t you want to read it now? (No matter what I say.)

Nevertheless, a reviewer must review.

The story is set in an alternative 1975 on the largest of the Near Islands, an entirely fictional small archipelago located fifteen miles from Aberdeen. The girls are survivors of a nuclear attack on that city in what becomes obvious must have been a world-wide war. Most of the school’s pupils and teachers were away on a trip when the bombs fell.

The tale is narrated in retrospect (of a few years later) by the only boy, Stephen Ballantyne, son of the headmistress who took advantage of the convention that such children attend their parent’s school. All but one of the girls plus Stephen survive but his mother dies in the second blast.

A classic children’s story arrangement, then, with the parents out of the way and no other adults at hand. But these are not youngsters. They are fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds on the cusp of adulthood forced to rely on their own resources, albeit with a well-stocked library at hand. It helps the island is well-endowed with rabbits and sea-birds – not all of them palatable though.

The writing style is more irreverent than you might expect, with stabs at levity (one running joke in particular) and occasional addresses to the reader. It is at times consciously alliterative. In Dexter’s outlining of his scenario he has narrator Stephen tell us one girl’s name evokes “the milky mystery of midnight mosques.” And he eschews describing foul-mouthed language, “This is, after all, an adventure story set on a desert island.” Stephen also claims his greatest fault is self-effacement.

Step forward Pearl Wyss, “the smallest and mousiest-looking of the girls,” who had previously shown her mettle on a trip to a farm on the mainland for a demonstration of artificial insemination and, invited to repeat the farmer’s no doubt spitefully given information, does so flawlessly. Pearl becomes the driving force behind the rump school’s efforts to ensure survival, steering their debates and swaying (most of) the girls with her arguments.

Her awareness of the treatment of women by men down the ages colours her approach: watches to be set for any encroachment from the mainland, the building of a stockade and later a wall, the reconstruction of the curriculum to be more useful in their straitened circumstances, the manufacture of bows and training in shooting arrows.

The first man to arrive – on a rowing boat – only confirms her fears when he attempts to rape one of the girls. He is thereafter caged and ostracised.

Not all the girls agree with her. Some of their worries, such as wanting to get married in due course, a future Pearl’s prescriptions would seem to deny them, exemplify attitudes of the time where it is set. But her answer to that problem of course lies in front of them all the time. She is willing to be ruthless in defending the school against incursion by men no matter how inoffensive they may appear to be or even if they’re accompanied by women. Towards the book’s climax she says, “We make war because we hate war.” Turning into her enemy? All through the book Stephen acquiesces in her designs but in the final paragraphs he lets his air of self-effacement slip.

In an enterprise such as this it does not do to become bogged down on the details, the scenario is all. But two A-bombs dropped on Aberdeen? One would surely be enough. And how likely was it that a single mother in the 1970s would have become a headmistress; particularly of a girls’ school? Plus radiation sickness would most likely have been more prevalent than is presented here.

These are nit-picking, though. This may be no Lord of the Flies but it is still a well written, solid piece of work. In its essence it is not concerned about girls or women or whether they behave better or worse in any given situation. It is really about the nature of men and whether that nature will ever change.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- H2O (H₂O,) knit (knitted,) rowboat (several times; rowing boat,) E=mc2 (E = mc²,) focussed/unfocussed (x 2 each; focused/unfocussed,) airplanes (aeroplanes,) Benn Gunn (Ben Gunn,) “a saree” (a sari,) a sentence framed as a question but lacking its question mark, row-boat (x 2; elsewhere rowboat but in any case ‘rowing boat’,) “‘any who disagree this choice’” (who disagree with this choice.)