James Purdon
Ringing Off
Phone, the final part in a trilogy, follows two predecessors each composed under the sign of a different icon of modernity. Umbrella – mass-manufactured object, phallic fetish, civil servant’s companion – was about the mutually reinforcing relationship between the 20th century’s new forms of mechanical production and its new forms of mechanised and rationalised violence. It saw Will Self’s recurring maverick 1970s psychiatrist, Dr Zack Busner, pioneering a cure for encephalitis lethargica, a machine-age epidemic that, after the First World War, left its sufferers frozen in time: motionlessly comatose or caught in compulsive loops of repetitive movement.
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'Typical of Dickens to leave us with an unsolvable game of Cluedo. Was it John Jasper with the necktie in the cathedral, Stony Durdles with the fibula in the graveyard or Mrs Crisparkle with the arsenic in the close?'
Frances Wilson does some sleuthing.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-he-wrote-2
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They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats