Stella Gibbons many years, when in 1965 she contributed an essay to "Light on C.S. Lewis", a review of that writer's work edited by Jocelyn Gibb. In 1966 she wrote an essay for "Punch", "Genesis of a Novel", in which she mused on the detrimental effect of "Cold Comfort Farm" on her long term career. She likened the book to "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore". Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966, to Grenoble in France where she visited her
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