Coney-catching Coney-catching Coney-catching is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled "conny"), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief or con man. It was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals." The term was first used in print by
A Sort of Life A Sort of Life A Sort of Life is the first volume of autobiography by British novelist Graham Greene, first published in 1971. This volume covers Greene's early life, from mundane childhood in Surrey, through to school and university and on to his early working life as a sub editor at The Times and his years as a struggling novelist. His memoirs have been criticized for being oddly impersonal and for brushing over his marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, especially as his faith was to become a powerful motif in many of his novels. Despite these omissions he deals