Stella Gibbons detestation of pomposity and pretence. Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century", a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in "Cold Comfort Farm", with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman". Bradbury also observed that many of Gibbons's novels end in Austen-like nuptials. Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time." This matter-of-fact quality
By the Pricking of My Thumbs first novels in the 1920s to the last in the 1970s. They were youthful in two Christie books written in the 1920s, middle-aged in a World War II spy novel, and elderly in this work. The title of the book comes from Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", when the second witch says: By the pricking of my thumbs,<br>Something wicked this way comes. The novel is divided into four books. In Book 1 Tommy and Tuppence Beresford visit Tommy’s aunt Ada in a retirement home called Sunny Ridge. While Tommy talks with his aunt, Tuppence has a conversation