Poor Mojo's Newswire

A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

"Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."
"Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll's nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

. . .

Baker believes that the allies flung aside all possibilities of peace, that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese, and Churchill inaugurated bombing of civilian populations to provoke Hitler to respond by attacking London and, ultimately, draw America into the war. This offering up of London especially offends Baker. “There’s an England that entirely swallows up Churchill. He should be seen as a minor figure compared to the real greatness of Tennyson or Macaulay, the real people. Churchill put at risk everything that is important about the history of England – Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, for God’s sake!”

The German leadership, he argues, may have been evil, but the allies were warmongers, handling this diseased outbreak in Europe in precisely the wrong way. Imagine, he says, a madman holding hostages in a building. Some hostages get out but are driven back in by the police. Then the police attack, setting fire to the building. The madman kills the hostages and, finally, himself. The police did everything wrong, says Baker, and so did the allies.

Dumas, the author of swashbuckling classics such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, wrote a final unfinished epic that had been lost for more than a century.

Years of painstaking literary detective work followed before the academic Claude Schopp was able to put the lost story back together again.

Next month it will be published in Britain for the first time, as The Last Cavalier, a stirring 750-page rampage through the Napoleonic wars, weaving together the classic Dumas themes of love, patriotism and vengeance.