All Agatha All the Time

I've been rereading quite a few Agatha Christie books, mostly for fun but also partly because my new glasses haven't arrived yet (and won't until the 19th, unfortunately).

I can't wear my contacts for too long, or they hurt - so I either have to read (and do everything else) with taped up, askew glasses, or read with the book about 1cm from my face. In that position, it's hard to read anything new that I don't trust.

Anyhow, here's a list of words, ideas, etc. that I've marked for research and follow-up (sorry, lingo from work there; I've moved to a new section and have been concentrating hard all week) [this is why I not only have many a TBR pile and an endless wishlist, but also a Books-I-Just-Finished-With-Flags-Marking-Things-To-Look-Up pile]:

"he'd probably had to retrench his scale of living a good deal since the war"

"Michael and I are absolutely on our beam ends. Mick's had a really good part offered to him... Now we'll be in clover."

post-WWII England: "With eggs so scarce and mostly foreign at that, so that boiling is always risky."

to scotch a rumour

to doss down on the couch (rather than sleep in the bed)

"he didn't half create" - i.e. made a fuss

"the nigger in the wood pile"

saying or quote: "three to one, the nun"

"not for her the state of mind of Cortez' men upon the peak in Darien."

"...as your poet says, 'to annoy, because he knows it teases.'"

"In my young days the young men... discussed Maeterlinck's 'Bluebird'."

"mugging over some notes"

I know two things about the horse, and one of them is rather coarse

boracic acid (what is this stuff, anyway? Google here I come!)

the green bay tree

A Lion of Lucerne

"cut the cackle and come to the horses"

Milton's Sabrina Fair (no, I haven't finished reading Paradise Lost yet!)

"Mrs. Gamp" as a nickname

"So might Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have stared at each other with the word Iphigenia on their lips" (how I wish schools still gave one a proper grounding in the classics!)

"...don't be like the heroines of third-rate thrillers who start in the very first chapter by having something they can't possibly tell for no real reason except to gump up the hero and make the book spin itself out for another fifty thousand words."

a song lyric: "For the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin."

"...a line from one of your poets: 'A question is never settled until it is settled - right.'"

"'Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.' A line from one of your poets."

"all according to Cocker"

"a secret de Polichinelle" - a secret that everyone can know, and people who don't know it never hear it, cos everyone assumes they know it already

And, finally, a riddle from Poirot, just for fun:
"'What is it that has two legs, feathers, and barks like a dog?'
"'A chicken, of course,' I said wearily. 'I knew that in the nursery.'
"'You are too well informed, Hastings. You should say, 'I do not know.' And then me, I say 'A chicken,' and then you say, 'But a chicken does not bark like a dog,' and I say, 'Ah! I put that in to make it more difficult.'"