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Raisins Although nowadays chiefly regarded as a useful ingredient of puddings, cakes and mincemeat, or as a pleasant dessert extra, raisins are a foodstuff of great antiquity, forming for many centuries a staple food of nomadic peoples. Raisins appear first in recorded history among the Ancient Egyptians, who had a high regard for this fruit.

If you were passed by a BL 1.5 or 2‐litre car on the roads of Britain's Midands recently, you could have unknowingly witnessed the beginnings of a new epoch in transport: flower power with a vengeance. For the overtaking car chugging effortlessly by in the other lane might well have been a test diesel‐type model running on liquid flower power — sunflower oil. Its engine, run entirely on ordinary sunflower oil as used by thousands of housewives in their kitchens, is claimed to do up to 75 miles per gallon.

THE WAY WRITERS WORK has always interested readers of their books. There is no doubt that in the various foibles of literary men there is something reflective of their approach to their craft.

The title of a book often gives its author more trouble than the actual writing. Only rarely does an author start with a title ready‐made; more often he finishes the book and then casts around for the perfect title.

CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS, like all well‐publicized figures of the present day, are well enough known to the world. Thanks to the advertising of publishers, the ubiquity of television, cinema newsreels, newspaper gossip writers, personal appearances to sign copies of new books and, above all, the perfection of modern photography, there can be few writers to‐day who are not known to their public as faces. Yet, on the whole, present‐day authors' faces are a mundane lot. Few literary figures can now be called spectacular to look at. There are a few lank, long‐haired, ethereal figures, one or two striking beards, and a handful of faintly exotic types, but in the main, present‐day authors (and authoresses, for that matter) are a dull crowd, indistinguishable in a thousand people picked at random. They are stodgy, rather bored in countenance, sucking overdone pipes, or peering owlishly from behind commonplace horn‐rimmed spectacles. All the spectacular figures have gone. Bernard Shaw was the last reminder of the spacious days when a literary man appeared his part. We no longer have the gigantic majesty of G. K. Chesterton, the aristocratic demeanour of A. E. W. Mason, or the cadaverous, bearded mask of D. H. Lawrence, while the bewhiskered dignity of Trollope and Dickens now seems but a myth.

In a more spacious age, when books were far fewer and better bound than they are today, they were used on occasion primarily as furniture. Neat lines of handsome volumes were considered an essential part of any well‐equipped room. This led to the practice of having dummy books on the shelves, where the numbers of real books did not extend far enough. To modern readers, dummy books seem a curious and inexplicable relic of the past, yet many stately houses and otherwise impeccable libraries had their rows of dummies, each properly bound but empty save for dust, or perhaps letters, bills and other odds and ends. The devising of appropriate titles for their dummy volumes gave our forefathers considerable scope for wit and punning.

How long does it take to write a book? Authors often get asked this question. There is, of course, no straightforward universal answer; so much depends on the book, on the author concerned, and also on many other circumstances. Some books are generated slowly, some quickly, a few at immense speed. Some may even be the work of very many years, or even a lifetime. The question of the actual time taken over writing is one that always interests readers.

A NOTE arrives from Crispin Gill, present editor of The countryman, that unique rural quarterly that like so many magazines these days is not quite what it was, but which this year celebrates 50 years of successful publication. I am intrigued by the fine‐detailed illustration block at the head of the paper. It shows a farmer‐type in tweeds and soft hat contentedly smoking his pipe as he leans (on a summer's evening?) over a traditional five‐barred gate set in a field stone wall. His faithful collie stands at his heel, the village church nestles in the distance, a flock of birds (rooks?) wing their way over the horizon, a huge briar rose in full bloom angles in from one side, while beneath it an idealised song‐bird perches jauntily on a convenient dead bough, facing a tall clump of cow‐parsley. A sense of rustic peace pervades all. Everything is perfect, completely soporific, quite innocuous. A modern ad‐man's dream of the countryside, in fact. Precisely. And therefore totally the antithesis of everything that old J W Robertson Scott, the magazine's founder and original editor, stood for and believed in. Indeed, he coined his own description of it: ‘townee sentimentalising about the country’ was what he called such stuff.

Whilst the therapeutic value of suitable reading during certain illnesses is fairly widely recognised, surprisingly little has been written on the subject. Practical advice on what to read, and when, is hard to come by, but a number of literary men have noted down their views and experience from time to time.

It is said that when rats outnumber human beings civilisation collapses. The signs of decay from this truly appalling cause may not yet be evident, but it is a long‐attested fact that the world's rat population certainly equals the human, and has done so for a long time. ‘When we talk about rodent control’, said one expert recently, ‘we're talking about human survival.’ No other human pest exerts such pressure on the human race. In terms of the raiding of food stocks, the spread of diseases from typhoid and cholera, bites and infections, the rat presents a unique menace.