Hemlines as a measure of national crisis (p.64): The author will be forever grateful to the renowned military historian and strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart for imparting this interesting observation to him in 1968. It may explain why the mini-skirt has, since the sixties, never really gone out of style.

Students of the history of computing will recognize in the Glooper a distant echo of the Phillips Economic Computer, built in 1949 by engineer-turned-economist Bill Phillips, which also made an impressive hydraulic model of the national economy. No Igors were involved, apparently. One of the early machines can be found in the Science Museum, London, and a dozen or so others are on display around the world for the interested observer.

And finally, as ever, the author is grateful to the British Heritage Joke Foundation for its work in ensuring that the fine old jokes never die…

Waiting in darkness — A bargain sealed — The hanging man — Golem with a blue dress — Crime and punishment — A chance to make real money — The chain of gold-ish — No unkindness to bears — Mr Bentkeeps time

THEY LAY IN THE DARK, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.

But some had shattered and some, the younger ones, had gone silent.

The weight was increasing.

Something must be done.

One of them raised his mind in song.

It was a hard bargain, but hard on whom? That was the question. And Mr Blister the lawyer wasn't getting an answer. He would have liked an answer. When parties are interested in unprepossessing land, it might pay for smaller parties to buy up any neighbouring plots, just in case the party of the first part had heard something, possibly at a party.