The Professor and Other Writings (45 page)

^*
Siegfried Sassoon, in
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
(1930): “Markington had gloomily informed me that our [War] Aims were essentially acquisitive, what we were fighting for was the Mesopotamian Oil Wells. A jolly fine swindle it would have been for me, if I'd been killed in April for an Oil Well!”

^*
Morbid authorial note from 2010: in December 2008 one of these banshee F-18s crashed on my mother's street less than a block from her house. While the pilot ejected safely, four people were killed on the ground and four houses destroyed.

^*
David Perry,
Jazz Greats
(London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 139.

^*
Author's note:
House and Garden
folded in 2007—a casualty of a global economic recession, skyrocketing production costs, and intensifying digital competition.