“A kleptomaniac,” I said. “Which means, if the term is not familiar to you, a chap who flits hither and thither pinching everything he can lay his hands on.”

So the heroic infant was able to gen up on all she needed to know about the making of bathtub gin by consulting a selection of large and impressive volumes in the reference section.

Surrey […] was negotiating with his wife to move the family (two teenaged girls, reluctant to leave their high school friends) to Tathra and a new house, perhaps with a view of the sea. The trick was going to be maintaining the loyalty of his longstanding if slow-paying rural clients, when he planned to spend most of his time on the coast, away from the extremes of the Goulburn climate ('Either too cold, too hot, too dry, too windy, or too wet,' he was wont to say). There had proved to be lots of minor crime on the coast, which augured well for the seachange.

When Susan Seligson thinks about breasts — and, since she’s a DDD-endowed (touché) middle-aged woman who’s been groped and catcalled her whole life, that’s often, too — she thinks about ... her own DDDs.