>>Hi Terry
>>
>>>Nah, I'm not that bothered about them. Agather Christies, for instance, leave me cold.
>>
>>One last try to convince you. This is different, and has a law angle to it.
>>
>>Okay, okay forget it. *g*
>
>No, I quite like court-room dramas (one of my popular TV series at the moment is the US "Law and Order", which combines the crime investigation with the courst case), and many major films have been based on the courts.
>
>But I stress "dramas". I've never been bothered to read them. I remember the old Perry Mason TV series, and later Raymond Burke series "Ironside". Maybe I'm wrong and would enjoy them. But, by the sounds of them from you, if I did get involved it would take up all my reading time from then on, if there are so many.

For the record, Raymond Burr.

>Generally I don't get into a genre. My current book is "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer, before that "5 people you meet in heaven" ... I was trying to keep track but I've forgotten (just imagining what's stacked up on my bedside table :-) Suffice to say, a varied mix of fact and fiction.
>
>Just remembered :-) It was a similar Dan Brown Band-waggon conspiracy novel about an Elizabethan expedition to establish a colony in America, claim a new meridian and introduce a new, non-gregorian calendar that would give England supremacy over Spain and the Catholic Church, which spills into modern times with the discovery of documents ... you know the score. But I can't remember the name or author. Mind you, that WAS handed to me, rather than my seeking it.

Have I got a book for you! Here is the first paragraph (it's called "The Sot-Weed Factor"):


IN THE LAST YEARS of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to be the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.


You can read the first few pages here

I've actually read this book 14 times. There was a time when I would get a physical craving around every August (for unknown reasons) to read it. I think I was an addict, but I'm ok now.

Hmmm... I think it's time to read it again.