British literature Scots. The poet Michael Longley (born 1939) has experimented with Ulster Scots for the translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection "The Ghost Orchid". Among significant writers in this genre in the early twentieth-century were Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903), who wrote spy novels, Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy) author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel", an historical romance which recounted the adventures of a member of the English gentry in the French Revolutionary period. The title character established the notion of a "hero with a secret identity" into popular culture. John Buchan wrote adventure novels like "Prester
Hoist with his own petard Hoist with his own petard "Hoist with his own petard" is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is literally that the bomb-maker (a "petard" is a small explosive device) is blown up ("hoisted" off the ground) with his own bomb, and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice. The phrase occurs in a central speech in the play in which Hamlet has discovered a plot on his life by Claudius and resolves to respond to it by letting the plotter be "Hoist with his own petard." Although the now-proverbial