Is this the way to Amaretto?

I saw this sign in Southwark this evening, and haven't been able to stop grinning at it since. Alas, it seems to be one of a kind. In an ideal world -- or an ideal Southwark, at any rate -- there'd be a whole serious of similarly stuffy signs, straight out of an Ealing comedy. 'Commit No Nuisance'. 'Do Behave Now'. 'Well, Really.' 'Oh, Put That Down'. 'Now Look Here'. And so on.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Last you heard I was in Fulham, and indeed I was happily encamped there till late this morning, wondering why on earth my hair had metamorphosed from Han Solo to Farrah Fawcett. It may need cutting.

Taking my leave of my industrious hostess I strode out into the grey and damp of London just after eleven today; I was due to meet Technically and the Fairy Blogmother by Knightsbridge tube station, and was rather winging it in terms of how much time I'd need for the trip. I wasn't too worried, though, as I was walking more through desire than need; were time's winged chariot to hurry too near I was more than happy to grab a bus.

My curious London knack for punctuality when dependent solely on my feet paid off again, and I wound up skulking under an awning waiting for the others to arrive, dug into Conrad's masterpiece of spy fiction while wondering why the fur protesters next to me were complaining. If Harrod's were indeed engaged in illegal trade, as the protesters' banners claimed, then why didn't they just report them to the police?

The girls joined me soon enough, and we set off to meet up with the Cheesemonger before going for a stroll along the South Bank, browsing in the somewhat overpriced book market. Eventually we ambled towards Southwark, there to increase our numbers, to quaff an ale or two, and have some dinner, before setting out for the main business of the evening.

The centrepiece of this trip was always going to be tonight's performance of Involution, running in Southwark's Pacific Playhouse for the past fortnight, and which I first heard good things of back in September, wandering through Whitehall with the Blogmother, saying that she thought it was Ms Welch's best work so far.

I'm inclined to agree; while I've enjoyed her earlier plays, all of which I've found hilarious, this was a lot meatier. It's not just that the characters seem more substantial and better-rounded now than before; it's that she's grappling with serious questions this time, and does it well. I like plays and novels of ideas anyway -- it's hard to like Edwardian writing otherwise! -- and this is a fine example of such. I'm hoping to have a read of the script itself at some point, since I'd like to think it through properly. There were a couple of aspects of it that didn't ring quite true for me, but until I have a look at the script I'll reserve judgment. Like I said, it was a meaty play, with lots in it.

I'm still not sure about the performances of the two blokes, but the four girls were, I thought, spot on. Jane Lesley's Violet was -- for my limited amount of money -- the best of the quartet, but the other three were good too. Samantha Hopkins's 'Gemma' was hilarious and must have taken a phenomenal amount of control, Sara Pascoe's Talulah was disturbingly reminiscent of one or two people I know myself, and Ursula Early's Dorcet had a Jo Brand-esque earthiness that grounded the character remarkably well.

As for directing, there were a couple of violent scenes that were brilliantly executed, while the set seemed depressingly apt, though I'm sure the Fairy Blogmother is deluding herself in her conviction that Cohen's flat, in which all the action is set, is based on her own. Granted, it's about the same size, and both rooms have ingenious folding out chair-bed things for guests, but there the similarities end. And yes, I know, such clever bits of furniture surely have names, but I'm drawing a blank.

Anyway, enough of this. There's Amaretto to be sampled, and old Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy sketches to watch. I'll play your game, you rogue.

Let's All Go Down the Strand!

I've been doing a lot of walking on this trip. Hovering over the model in the Building Centre yesterday I got rather ambitious. Can I walk to Shepherd's Market? Surely I just go back down the Tottenham Court Road, keep going along Charing Cross Road, swing right at Oxford Circus along Shaftesbury Avenue, and then once I hit Piccadilly Circus I just head up along Piccadilly itself until I hit Green Park?

Which reminds me, having read Do Not Pass Go is causing me to run a risk of becoming a London bore. God alone knows what I'll be look once I've got my teeth into London: A Biography. Still, in answer to something I've wondered for years, and which I suspect at least one of you has done too, here's the tale of where Piccadilly earned its name, courtesy of Mr Moore.

If you don't know how it got the name, don't waste your time guessing. What happened was that in the early seventeenth century the land near what is now the Circus was bought and developed by a tailor who had made a fortune from the manufacture of pickadils -- spiked metal collars employed to support the elaborate ruffs popular at the time. See what I mean? It's like a risibly transparent false definition in Call My Bluff.

As the fields along the ancient road disappeared beneath grand mansions, so repeated attempts were made to endow the street with a more appropriately stately name. For a few years it was Portugal Street, honouring the nationality of Charles II's missus, but Piccadilly was just too good to waste and by the end of the eighteenth century it had stuck fast. Dozens of dukes and earls built or acquired large and plush residences all the way up to Hyde Park Corner -- for a hundred years until the 1850s, Piccadilly was the grandest address in London.

And in case you're curious, the first electrically lit hoardings appeared at Piccadilly Circus in 1893. Yes, you wanted to know that, didn't you? All part of the service . . .

That was yesterday, though, before drinks and embarrassing recollections with an old friend who I haven't seen in an eternity, and before heading off to meet up with the charming young lady with whom I've been staying for the last two nights.

Today saw me being rather more ambitious in my walking, setting out from Fulham Broadway, getting lost somewhere in South Kensington but eventually finding South Kensington tube station where I almost collided with Chris Evans before heading up past to V & A to the Brompton Oratory -- a tad too pompous for my tastes -- and Holy Trinity Brompton, mothership of the evangelical Alpha Course, the bowels of which I eagerly explored, browsing and pondering books whilst comely wenches flitted about with a peculiar air of serene industry.

On then past Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, along Constitution Hill towards Buckingham Palace, down the Mall - stopping to stare open-mouthed at the Household Cavalry who have enthralled me as a child -- to Trafalgar Square. Glad to see it rather less heavily plagued by pigeons than before, I took a right onto Strand -- not 'The Strand' curiously enough, and deriving its name from an Old Norse word for pebbly beach, don't you know? -- and hurried along onto Fleet Street, tracking the course of what was once a notoriously foul river. Ah, Bell Yard and St Dunstan's, where that nice Mister Todd once plied his tonsorial trade! And then, somehow, making it to St Paul's at exactly twelve, there to soak up the sun in Paternoster Court and wait for an old friend and onetime neighbour for lunch!

After lunch and much catching up -- it's been five years, after all! -- I wandered around by London Wall to the Museum of London and idled my way onto Holborn, by which point my feet were starting to ache. I'm afraid my boots were not really made for walking, after all.

Into the Cittie of Yorke I slipped, there to sip at a pint, to reminisce on my last evening there more than two years ago, to scrutinise my map, and to ease myself back into The Secret Agent. It wasn't long before the Fairy Blogmother phoned, and, on realising how close I was to her place of work, zoomed around to join me for a post-work beverage. A couple of pints and much catching up later -- and no progress made with my book -- I realised the time and raced for the tube to Fulham!

It's been a leisurely evening, which is just as well after my walking and my hostess's week. Tomorrow should be a little livelier. For now, though, the wine continues to flow, and I'm learning rather more than I expected about Italy.

Sandwiches in the Sky

Having wrestled with my map and a nightmarish junction while walking to the station this morning, missing a lunch arrangement as a result, I'm doubly grateful I didn't have to rely on my ropey map last night, instead having been cheerfully chauffered from Chelmsford station to the house. It was a lovely evening, and was great to see my sister and the newest additions to the extended Gargoyle clan.

With my lunch arrangement with an old school friend having been scrapped -- well, rescheduled to instead having drinks in Shepherd's market when he'd finished work -- I popped up to Camden instead where I had a fine lunch and discovered a fine little bookshop before returning to the familiar delights of Zone One.

One thing I'd meant to find out more about this trip was the forty or so ghost stations on the Underground. I'd mentioned this to a friend the other day, an expert in the arcana of rail travel and cathedrals, and asked whether he'd be about.

'Sorry, old man,' he replied. 'Will be there on Easter Monday. If it's disused Underground stations you're after, then check this out. Looks to be a very exciting exhibition. How the devil are you?'

I'm not sure that 'exciting' was really the right word, but the exhibition at the Building Centre on Store Street, entitled 'Underground: London's Hidden Infrastructure', promised to expose London's inner workings and demonstrate that without a successful underground, nothing built on top could function. Suitably intrigued, I strolled over and had a good gander. The mail tunnels alone fascinated me. How had I never heard of them?

I'm afraid the highlight of the Building Centre in general, though, was the enormous scale model of London, tracking the Thames from Battersea Power Station to out beyond the site of the 2012 Olympic Stadium.

I circled it like a fascinated vulture, stopping, hovering, squinting, thinking. Take a look at it here, where you can see Paddington Statin in the fireground, the train lines running into it from the bottom of the shot. I imagine that's the Marylebone Road running up the left-hand side of the shot. It's not hard to pick out the BT Tower, Centrepoint, and the London Eye, all more or less in line with each other, and off beyond them you can see the great mass of buildings springing up round the absurdly nicknamed Gherkin.

Which reminds me. There's a new building planned for Fenchurch Street, a 155 metre high tower due in 2011. So what, you might shrug.

It'll have a roof garden. A publicly accessible one. Imagine -- a park 500 feet up! It seems the plan is that it'll be like any other park, except 37 stories up. It'll be free in, and the kind of place you can go to eat your sandwiches in.

And people wonder why I want to move to London.

Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!

Right, so having taught my last two classes of this absurdly short term -- on laws regarding cleanliness and Godliness in ancient Greek city-states, since you don't ask -- I'm heading off for the airport in a moment.

The plan is to fly to Stansted this evening and spend the night at my sister's, with her, my brother-in-law, and my niece. I hope they won't be too traumatised on seeing me. Last time I saw them was more than six months ago, and I'd just had my hair cut. It's not been touched since, and now leaves me more than slightly reminiscent of Han Solo in the original Star Wars film.

Only cooler, and more handsome, of course.

Curiously, the week I had my barnet last pruned also saw me seeing three very dear friends just before they departed to Brazil, France, and the United States respectively. I've not seen them since. I've half a mind to leave my hair untouched until they shall be returned to me. Like Augustus, I guess, after the disaster of the Teutoburger Forest. . .

I'll be getting a bus from the airport to Chelmsford, but although I've drawn a map in case I need to walk to the house, I'm rather hoping I'll be picked up when I arrive. Worried inspection of the maps just a few minutes ago suggests that I must have engaged in my rudimentary cartographic endeavours while drunk and without my glasses, probably under cover of darkness.

This doesn't bode well. Wish me luck.

Squeezing the Oranges

I'm off to London tomorrow -- or at any rate I shall be flying to the ludicrously-named London Stansted, an absurdity akin to arriving in Dublin Mullingar -- for a few days in and around the metropolis with family and friends.

It seems fitting then that just today I've finished reading Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go, an amusing and enlightening guide to London inspired by the classic British 'Monopoly' set. I started reading NMRBoy's copy of it a year-and-a-half back, but returned it to him just before we left Manchester; it was only a few days ago that I finally got stuck into my own copy.

Anyway, it's definitely worth a read, not least for some strategic tips about the 'Monopoly' board; it seems that 'Jail' is the space most-commonly landed upon space, whereas -- as the more astute among you may have noticed in your youth -- no set is as landed upon as frequently as the oranges. In fact, it seems that they're the most productive set on the board by quite a long way, a fully-developed orange set netting on average £24,619 over a game, as opposed to £14,835 for the dark blues.

Yes, don't tell me that visiting this site is a waste of time!

The oranges are an odd collection anyway, as it's difficult to see why such obscure streets were chosen for the game. Bow Street is an inoccuous enough street by Covent Garden, home of the famous Bow Street Runners. There isn't a Marlborough Street in central London, though the game's makers presumably meant Great Marlborough Street, where a famous magistrates' court sat till a few years back. And Vine Street? Vine Street is an obscure alley off Bond Street, where a police station was once located, and with just one notable anecdote attached to it, though Moore concedes that it's a gem. Ahem.

The only story the street had in its locker (admittedly it's a cracker) concerns the encounter that took place there between Frantisek Kotzwara and Susannah Hill on 2 September 1791. Then sixty-one, Kotzwara was one of Europe's greatest double bassists and the noted composer of fantasias with a military bent -- The Siege of Quebec; The Battle of Prague. Bohemian by birth and nature, he was a regular in the bagnios and fleshpots of Georgian London, and on the night in question found himself in the company of the aforementioned sex worker at her room at No. 5 Vine Street.

Nothing if not a gentleman, Kotzwara suggested a meal before the main business of the evening, furnishing Susannah with two bob for a substantial and well-lubricated spread of victuals. Some people like to round off a good meal with a smoke or a snooze, but Kotzwara was made of different stuff. 'After a dinner of beef, porter and brandy,' read one studiously sober account, 'he asked her to cut off his genitals.' perhaps unwilling to bite the hand that fed her, as it were, Hill refused, but interestingly agreed to assist Kotzwara in fastening a ligature first round the doorknob and thence his neck. Five minutes later, the kneeling, trouserless maestroeagerly conducted himself to a breathlessly memorable finale -- tantalisingly uncertain, even at the end, whether he was coming or going. Arrested and charged with murder, Hill was acquitted after the judge accepted her testimony. The court records were withheld to keep the precise and shocking details from the public domain, but the case still remains a landmark for suicidally adventurous perverts and bored law students alike.

Barring an outdated legal connection, all that Moore could imagine that might link the three streets was that nowadays, 'alone amongst the Monopoly groups, its three streets couldn't muster a single McDonald's between them.'

Theology the Viz Way

I came across this a while ago, and having read it to a couple of people, describing each scene as I did, I thought I may as well post it here.

'Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains,' as G.K. Chesterton noted almost a hundred years ago in his copy of Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making. As such, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that none of these problems has evaded the consideration of Christian theologians over the years. People have realised that there are certain paradoxes at work.

The efficacy of petitionary prayer, free will and predestination, the purpose of miracles, and overall questions of theodicy -- all these are subjects of debate and theological exercise even today. I'm not saying that they've all been answered, not by a long way -- they'd hardly still be subjects of debate if they were -- just that Christians tend to be aware that their faith isn't always a simple matter. After all, it'd be odd if these issues had entirely slipped the notice of the what GKC described as 'the one intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years.'

So don't worry, it's not as if any of this is news. Contrary to what some people tend to think, being religious doesn't mean being stupid, and shouldn't involve shutting down our intellectual faculties. After all, when Our Lord said he were to be like little children, he was exhorting us towards innocence, not towards ignorance.

A Perfect Sentence

I'm afraid I've not heard much of Goldfrapp's oeuvre, but what I've heard I've liked, especially the incessant pulsating sexiness of their cover version of Baccara's melancholy 1977 dance classic 'Yes Sir, I Can Boogie'.

It seems from today's Guardian that Alison and her sidekick Will Gregory have decided to change direction, a change that the Guardian reckons was inevitable if they weren't to go stale.

When you've appeared on stage playing a theremin with your crotch while dressed as a kind of besequinned Nazi air hostess, as Goldfrapp did after the release of 2005's Supernature, you could reasonably argue that you've explored the possibilities of camply sexualised glam-influenced electro-pop pretty thoroughly.

That may be one of the greatest sentences ever written. It's up there with 'Kat's hamster's called Mouse.'

Mancunian Gargoyles

The trip's gone well so far -- Friday's meeting went about as well as could be hoped for, I think, and I've managed lots of time with my cousins here, and a little with a few friends. I'll be sad to be heading home tomorrow; God alone knows when I'll be back.

Today's been a bit hectic, what with me having tea and catching up with two mates this morning, soup with Jane Petal this afternoon, and in between a long chat with the mysterious figure I euphemistically refer to only as 'The Angel.'

I'm staying out by Manchester's whistling tower this evening, and so making my way here -- post soup -- I lingered a while in Albert Square. No, not that Albert Square. The one in Manchester, you buffoons.

Albert Square is one of the most remarkable places in the city, although I didn't realise how wonderful it was until I was a showing a Canadian friend about and doing so took a stroll through the city almost six years ago.

Albert Square doesn't look English. It looks continental European, far more at more at home in Belgium. A mock-medieval fantasy, this place is Flanders to the core. Go there, and take a look at the great open space with buildings maybe three or four storeys high on three sides, but with one side taken up by the astonishingly disproportionate bulk of Waterhouse's gothic town hall.

Directly in front of the hall's entrance you'll see the Albert Memorial, notable as the only Mancunian statue sheltered from the city's perpetual rain, surely proof in itself of how much Victoria grieved for her dead husband, while off the Cross Street corner of the square you'll see the Victoria Fountain, designed by Thomas Worthington, creator of the Albert Memorial, and erected in 1897 to commemorate the Queen's jubilee. Apparently it had been moved to Heaton Park in the twenties, but after decades of neglect it was restored and returned to its original location in 1997. It's still one of my favourite things in Manchester, not least because of its sneering gargoyles.

I don't talk nearly enough about gargoyles here. I really ought to rectify that.

And what's wrong with the term 'Toast Bitch'?

Having overindulged to a frightening degree last night at Nigella's, I felt that this morning it'd be only prudent in Trof to sample their healthy breakfast; fasting for Lent from eggs, cheese, and butter and its ilk was a factor in my decision, I have to admit, but today being a Sunday it wasn't the decisive one. No, I simply felt some common-or-garden gastronomic virtue was called for, and so had a bowl of yoghurt with honey and fruit, topped with sprinkling of oats, with a glass of orange juice on the side. It was a deliciously healthy start to the day.

For an encore, I spent most of the afternoon drinking water in Solomon's with the Ginger Beast, before being chauffered to St Augustine's for mass, after which I fear I managed to earn nonchalantly the undying hatred of one of our new altar servers.

On then to the Chinese Buffet, there to continue my nostalgic trip through Manchester's culinary establishments, this time in less abstemious fashion than earlier in the day, and then back to the girls' house, there to delight them with some of my favourite Muppet Show scenes ever...


Not quite a top ten, but nonetheless, allow me to introduce 'Ten' Moments of Muppet Genius:

1. There was the infamous 'Muppera' by the Fuzz Brothers -- that's from Season Four, episode Nine, trivia fans, hitherto only featured on the mindbogglingly brilliant Muppet Weird Stuff as presented by The Great Gonzo and available to rent in a video library near you, assuming you live in Frankfurt.

2. Having mentioned everyone's favourite Weirdo, you need to watch him sabotaging Fozzie's attempt at reading Robert Frost's most famous poem and singing the classic 'Act Naturally', not least for apt deployment of the phrase 'ludicrous things'.

3. 'Hugga Wugga' evolved from the Sclrap Flyapp sketch Jim Henson performed on the Today Show in the sixties, but sure -- surely -- it's intended as a comment on repression in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in general? Look at the big red monster with those Brezhnev eyebrows!

4. I don't know if you're a fan of The Thomas Crown Affair whether in its original incarnation or in its more recent Brosnan and Russo version, complete with improbable-sex-on-a cold-marble-stairway sequence, but I'll bet you'll not have seen a better take on 'Windmills of Your Mind' than the Muppets'.

5. Of course, when it comes to upstaging originals, Beaker rather pulled out all the stops with his rendition of what many consider to be the worst song of all time. You should listen to everyone's favourite lab technician attempt 'Feelings' before you rush to the same conclusion. You may just enjoy the funniest two minutes of your life. Hell, it's worth it even for Zoot's sax...

6. Yes, the Muppets had their poignant moments. Take Robin's recitation of A.A. Milne's 'Halfway Down the Stairs', for example. An old girlfriend once asked me whether this was included for all the sensitive boys that used to watch. I could but blush and look abashed.

7. There were a whole subgenre on Muppet songs that were basically crap puns embraced with relish. Of these, my favourite has to be this hilarious version of 'I've Got You Under My Skin'. There are plenty more where that came from...

(I'd especially recommend 'All Of Me', 'I Feel Pretty', and Cole Porter's classic 'You Do Something To Me'.)

8. Believe it or not, not every Muppet Show sketch involved a song. I don't think I need to justify why the Koozebanian Mating Ritual should be on this list. If this really affects you, you can get a dustcatcher to commemorate it. And isn't she a beauty? It's all about the Galley-oh-hoop-hoop, really.

9. Rowlf was always my favourite muppet when I was young, while I always had a soft spot for Fozzie. I'm sad to say that my own sense of humour is sadly what you get when you crossbreed those of said dog and bear. Be that as it may, I've always loved their 'English Country Garden' duet. As for Rowlf himself, it's worth reminding yourselves of his love of Beethoven.

10. And finally, because my own resurgence of interest in Jim Henson's greatest creations largely coincided with the short-lived Muppets Tonight, I think you should really make the time to watch Miss Piggy auditioning with Billy Crystal for a part in When Harry Met Sally. The sequence starts about three minutes in. You'll like the Rob Reiner muppet.

If you don't enjoy those, you might as well sit in a box and scowl.

And with that, goodnight.

Someone Has To Make A Start

I fear my sleep patterns shall never recover from the last few weeks. Wednesday and Thursday nights saw me sleeping two full nights in a row for the first time since mid-January, and I'd hoped to make it three from three when I finally nestled under the covers last night. Alas, it was not to be, as I'd slept barely three hours when my phone woke me, bearing a transatlantic text from NMRBoy, desperate to know how yesterday's meeting had gone.

Unhappy though I was to have slept so little, my Comrade in Arms deserved to know how things had gone, so I texted him, and he called me, and somehow my throat obliged us both as I described yesterday's meeting at length.

I wished him a good night, and shut my eyes afresh, but sleep was not to bless me this time, and after a futile hour I sat up, rooted in my bag, crawled over to the television, stuck in a disc, and settled in to watch Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage, which I'd picked up for a song yesterday afternoon.

To my shame, I'd never heard of Sophie Scholl until just before Christmas when, on the website of The Times, I watched a marvellous short film of Clive James reading from Cultural Amnesia, his astonishing distellation of a lifetime's reading. I've been dumbstruck since.

Not long after the battle of Stalingrad, the key members of the little resistance group called the White Rose were all arrested. One of them was Sophie Scholl. During the showtrial staged at Hitler's order, she said something apparently simple, but its implications go on unfolding, even into our own time.

'Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it.'

Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich of February 22, 1943, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was but twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

Sophie's brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose, was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren't Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership of the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination.

The only means of resistance open to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch.

You would have thought that to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. he did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind.

Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone.

Is that you? No, and it isn't me either.

She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn't have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were.

But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.

Johann Reichardt, the executioner who had testified to Sophie's bravery, had seen more than his fair share of executions. He'd begun working at Stadelheim in 1924, and under the Nazi's twelve year reign he'd executed more than three thousand political prisoners; after their downfall he was reinstated and sent to the war-crimes prison at Landsberg, where he hanged Nazis who had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.

So I learned from Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn's Sophie Scholl & The White Rose, which I read last week, starting it almost as soon as I finished Bleak House. It's a fascinating read which gives full credit to all those other members of the White Rose who are so easily ignored next to Sophie. It reads like a novel, and is packed with all manner of curious observations, such as this remarkable aside about Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf:

The rather free and casual style of life of these young men during wartime -- attending concerts, taking fencing lessons, and joining Bach choral societies -- is surprising. Nothing like it happened in the United States during the Second World War, and one would expect even less to find that such freedom and informality existed in Nazi Germany.

The book's one serious flaw, I can't help feeling, though, is that it downplays Sophie's Lutheran faith, something which makes no sense in light of the attention paid to Willi Graf's Catholicism. That's not to say that the authors ignore it altogether, as they most certainly don't. They include extracts from diaries and letters where Sophie's Christianity is clear, and they make a point of describing how -- in her last meeting with her parents, just hours before her execution -- her mother asked her to remember Jesus, and she, with her last recorded words, replied 'Yes, but you too.'

So yes, you'd be a fool to read Sophie Scholl & The White Rose and not realise just how important her faith was to her, but you'd be hard-pressed to realise that she was a Lutheran. Granted, she'd rightly have seen her relationship with Christ as far more significant that her Lutheran confession, but that doesn't change the fact that it's odd that her Lutheranism is played down.