Sentence The Fifth

Now you should know, before going any further, that Maude Lyttleton is an intractable bardolator – she can cast a withering glance at Marlovians, Baconites, Oxfordists, Southamptonians and others of that ilk while uttering her pithy judgement of “Claimants to the Title are surely Ten a Penny, But they're null and void; of True Contenders William's not got Any” for to Maude, The Swan of Avon was not a Pub in Warwickshire, but a bolide which, like the comet, shone with dizzying brilliance

astounding his own age - and those yet to come - with an astonishing output and the sheer genius of his writing; she may seem a shrinking violet, a wallflower, a – dreaded insult – Spinster, but Maude can cross verbal swords with anyone on the subject of Master Shakespeare and has not been bested yet!

Maude Lyttleton (in Cloche Hat) and some Chums enjoy a lovely weekend Sans Mans!

Sentence The Sixth

And, while her dear friend, bosom companion and true soul-mate, the esteemed Professor Daphne Dumbiedykes found herself trapped in a foul dungeon, Maude Lyttleton sat on a bench outside St Giles Cathedral licking ice-cream from a wafer cone and applying her skills in crosswordese to that morning's cryptic puzzle in The Scotsman; her dour appearance attracting occasional glances from passers-by – no doubt wondering how one so apparently gloomy of aspect could find such evident pleasure in ice-cream or have the ability to tackle a puzzle set by Omniom simultaneously - the feared compiler of ferociously fiendish Monday Crosswords in that respected journal – for Maude had the appearance of a quidnuc, a fishwife, a frequenter of low bars and street corners where gossip is traded and salacious tales are told and the names and nefarious exploits of the city's elite are bandied about, rather than of an astute and intellectually gifted historian and Mademoiselle-de-Lettres who herself compiled her own puzzles under her pen-name Sartorius - often the devilishly difficult Saturday Prize Crossword which could quite easily take the whole weekend to complete – who only glanced once at 5 down, saw the clue “Mrs B's f(l)avourite for fish but in-no-wise foul” and instantly and correctly wrote in the 8 letters of mirepoix which she knew well from her own copy of Mrs Beeton's Manual, and sat back, for some instinct, some inexplicable sixth, seventh or eighth sense, had alerted her to danger, to some evil which befell at that precise moment, which put the life and exquisite limbs of Daphne in peril – “Something's Up” flashed across her brain and it was as if Ten Foot High letters of burning flame stood at the very spot where once was located The Heart of Midlothian and Maude leapt to her feet, dropping her newspaper and pen, heedless of the unfinished crossword or the photograph of Salomon on the front page, and dashed in the direction Daphne had taken just an hour before.