Epithalamium

Learned a new word from Elizabeth Peters' The Dead Sea Cipher: Epithalamium.

"The French couple wandered off, holding hands and accompanied, like a modern epithalamium, by the strains of the Beatles."

Love learning new words!

Jane Austen's Description of a Novel in The Speaker of Mandarin

In Ruth Rendell's murder mystery, "The Speaker of Mandarin," Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, paraphrased this quote from Jane Austen's novel, Northanger Abbey:

Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. [Source]

In "The Speaker of Mandarin," Inspector Wexford toured mainland China and encountered an English tourist who was subsequently murdered in Wexford's English jurisdiction. 

Information about the TV version of "The Speaker of Mandarin" can be found here. 

The Horse You Came In On

A line from The Horse You Came In On, a mystery by Martha Grimes:

And he thought of Joanna the Mad, sitting there in the Jack and Hammer and talking of the job of writing as completely mechanical.  Ah, surely she was wrong.  It had nothing to do with the hard, greasy machinery of life.  Oh, it was work, yes, but the work of gathering dews in a teacup or riveting stars to the moon.

I liked "the work of gathering dews in a teacup or riveting stars to the moon," description of writing.  Plus Martha is one of my favorite mystery writers.

Her website (linked above) includes an interactive map of England where one can explore the locations of the pubs mentioned in her "Richard Jury" novels.