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Last month I posted 30-odd metaphors from Ross Macdonald.

If you enjoyed sipping a word like brandy with Doris Lessing, then get comfortable for a bumper pack of similes and metaphors courtesy of Ross Macdonald and his story collection The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015), edited by Tom Nolan.

It’s a whole year since I made my last book spine poem (aka bookmash), about how swearing is good for you.

If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler.

Regular readers will be familiar with Strong Language, a group blog about swearing that I co-founded with James Harbeck in 2014.

I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.

An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’?

In Doris Lessing’s story ‘A Road to the Big City’, published in her 1957 collection The Habit of Loving (my Penguin paperback edition, pictured, is from 1960), two young women, sisters, are travelling by train in Johannesburg.