The seventh edition of this classic was published in September 2009, edited by Elizabeth Knowles. It is thicker than ever since the dictionary keeps up with what is being quoted in print and online and maintains its wonderful fund of quotations. This edition has almost a thousand new quotations.

This edition is also more beautiful than ever. The cover alone is enough to tempt a potential buyer – a far cry from the plain powder-blue with white writing of our old 1953 second edition.

All the old favourites are there; Mallory’s renowned response to the question why he wanted to climb Everest, ‘Because it’s there’, Mark Twain’s, ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’ and  Barack Obama has even made his appearance with, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice’.

Browsing the book becomes compulsive and you are left with Oscar Wilde’s famous thought, ‘I wish I had said that’, to which of course Whistler replied, You will, Oscar, you will.’

Meg Rosoff’s novels are popular with mature teenage readers. She writes about young, independent thinkers who are placed in unusual situations, without the influence of adults. They have exciting experiences and have to act resourcefully. The novels are gripping.

How I Live Now introduces a disaffected young American girl who arrives to live with her four fascinating teenage cousins in a strange England that is just on the verge of an even stranger war.

Daisy falls in love with her cousin, Edmond, and that love guides her through the confusing situation she is soon plunged into when a twenty-first century terrorist-driven war blankets out all news. We are seeing and hearing through Daisy and only slowly piece together the puzzle.

Daisy finds herself crossing a war-torn country with her delightful young cousin, Piper, in search of Edmond. Piper’s survival skills are invaluable but Daisy’s love and maturity are equally important. The novel culminates with a very clear message about the harmful effects of a war.

What I Was is equally enthralling but in a different way. This time, the protagonist is male – a schoolboy in a remote boarding school who develops a passion for Finn, a young person living alone on an East Anglian island.

Finn’s competence and way of life are enchanting to the schoolboy narrator, and he longs to be Finn or share Finn’s life. Slowly a relationship develops but it is shattered by the crisis that occurs.

Meg Rosoff holds a surprise for the reader in her final pages. This is fine writing for a teenage or even an adult audience.

Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, Alice Thomas Ellis

Cookery books are not generally as amusing as this one! Alice Thomas Ellis gives us three centuries of recipes and tasty titbits about food, sprinkled with a delightful handful of comedy.

Take, for example, the anecdote about Edgar and Gladys – he married her in haste when he was leaving for a remote part of Africa. When she joins him, he shows her round the bungalow and asks what she means to cook him for supper. Eggs were, he claimed, the only available ingredients. ‘But I don’t cook eggs!’ responded Gladys, who hated cooking, ‘but I could play you some Chopin.’  He threw her to the lions.

The male chauvinism of such a story is matched by the opulence of some of the menus. A menu for a 21st birthday party includes 30 roasted bullocks, 50 hogs, 50 calves and 50 sheep as well as, rather oddly, one leveret.

Five a day was simply not the rule. We are struck by the absence of vegetables in menus of the last three centuries.

Full of laughs and well worth reading, Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring – A Gallimaufry, published by Virago, is nevertheless, a book to dip into. It will keep you laughing for a month, but would be difficult to digest in a single portion.

Attractively bound hard-backed books containing lots of information seem to be big sellers among the piles laid out for Christmas. E: Foley and B. Coates ‘Homework for Grown-ups – everything you learnt at school … and promptly forgot’ is yet another in the series.

I received my copy as a gift and dipped into it rather casually at first. I was soon thoroughly enjoying some of the masses of information the book provides. It is embarrassing to get halfway through each chapter and confront ones own ignorance. In mathematics, for example, I got as far as a decagon but what is an icosagon?

Homework for Grown-ups

This is a treasure of a compendium of facts we like to think we know. It deals with English, Mathematics, Home Economics, History, Science, Religious Education, Geography, Classics, Physical Education and Art – a fine rounded education. (’Whose history?’ I hear you ask. There’s an eclectic dabble including Marathon, Yarmuk, Agincourt and the Somme.)

Homework for Grown-ups is certainly a useful book to have around if you need to know where your pancreas is or the name of a Greek letter. There are even test papers at the end of each chapter. My only criticism is that the authors didn’t provide an index of all that useful information.

The death of a child is the worst nightmare for most mothers. Oscar has cancer. He has very few days to live and knows it, but his parents are unable to face the truth and share their grief with him. The elderly hospital visitor, the lady in pink helps Oscar come to terms with his death.

The lady in pink suggests that Oscar  should write a letter to God each night. Each letter will represent a decade, so that we find Oscar at the age of 110, exclaiming with delight that he is older than his parents now. The letters are a lovely way of coming to terms with harsh reality.

The lady in pink has the very touching final words on the morning Oscar dies.

Oscar and the Lady in Pink, translated from Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s original novel in French, is a world best-seller – understandably! It fits into the category of ’self-help’ without being patronising or mawkish.

There are copies in the outstanding selection of books in English at the La Combe Migros store in Nyon. What a surprise to find such well-chosen novels, best-selling crime-fiction and factual books at prices that are approachable.

After many years spent laboriously teaching and learning languages, I was surprised to learn that teach yourself have a series of one-day courses. My Greek is minimal. I have the ten words most people share – kalimera, yasu, ne, ohi, efharisto and so on. We have a holiday in Greece coming up so why not?

The course comes with its CD and booklet and uses a mere fifty basic words. Liz teaches Andy on the plane. He is a bit of a clown but his low brow comments have some value as mnemonics. For example, he talks about throwing moss when he has to learn ‘thromos’ (street).

An advantage, for me at least, is that the course uses the script I am used to – that reduces the problem!

The idea behind the course is that it is infinitely better and more polite to have a smattering of a foreign language and at least to try to communicate, rather than expecting everybody else to speak English. The Independent claims that Elisabeth Smith’s one-day courses are “a language lifeline … fun, fast and easy”.

You can attempt French, German, Italian or Spanish in the same way, but I have yet to find out whether my ‘one-day’ skill will be any use at all.

Three lively little hardback books, published by Michael O’ Mara Books would make ideal presents for an elderly relative who seems to be becoming forgetful.

I Used to Know That by Caroline Taggart contains just about enough basic information to give its reader a set of GCE passes or average SAT scores.  There are chapters on basic English, mathematics up to the level of quadratic equations, chemistry, physics, biology and so on.

The General Knowledge chapter at the end contains intriguing up-to-date information like the new name for Pluto (Eris) now that it is no longer a planet.

It is rather daunting to realise that you have forgotten which US Presidents were assassinated or whether the Cretaceous period came before or after the Jurassic. This small volume lists all that sort of information as well as some rather irreverent comments. Take, for example, the remark that President Ford is remembered largely as the man said to be so dumb he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Two other works in the series are My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘Me’?), also by Caroline Taggart with J A Wines, and I before E (except after C) by Judy Parkinson. Neither is as dull as it sounds. The second of these lists hundreds of mnemonics for recalling significant information that we are sure to have forgotten.

Can you list the heads on Mount Rushmore? I couldn’t, but the mnemonic ‘We Just Like Rushmore’ reminds me that they are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. The book is full of similar mental tricks.

There is great excitement in the crossword world about the publication of the eleventh edition of The Chambers Dictionary.

The Bible, Mrs Beeton’s Cookery and Household Management and the bulky family dictionary used to be the three works of reference on the shelves – the unchangeable authorities to be consulted.

It was an eye-opener to me, when I joined the cruciverbalists as an amateur compiler, to learn that there is a single dictionary that is accepted as the authority by all editors and compilers in the UK. (Webster’s provides a similar service in the USA).

What is more, a new edition of this authority appears every three years or so!

A word that is not verifiable in Chambers is rejected by editors and setters alike.

Why Chambers? It really keeps up to date. For example, in my 2003 Ninth Edition, new words were dotcom, SIM card and docusoap. There is, to quote the Preface a ‘tradition of sprinkling the occasional light-hearted definition into the mix’.

Setters love to use the obscure words that lurk in Chambers’ pages. Take, for example this clue in a recent Spectator crossword: ‘As an afterthought, around dark, return to pinch fruit’. You have the letters SK?UM? Chambers provides the answer!

Just for a change, I thought I would take a detour from ‘Book My Place’ and talk about a ‘Museum My Place’

In ‘La France Voisine’, about an hour’s drive from Geneva in the beautiful Jura lakes area, at Clairvaux Les Lacs, there is an astonishing new museum – Les Machines à Nourrir le Monde.

A shepherd in the hamlet of Augisey who had time on his hands created his own toolbench and spent forty-five years of his life creating scale models entirely out of a variety of woods. When he died in 2000, his family arranged to have his life’s work on show in Clairvaux.

The visit begins with a film that shows that all the models are working models and complete even to the minute screws, pipes and tools.

For us, the agricultural machines were the most fascinating. We visited the museum with a group that included several local farmers and they exclaimed with joy that they had used those very machines in their youth. These ranged from simple hand ploughs to elaborate harvesting machines. We couldn’t help thinking how the display demonstrated how a machine today can do the work of ten men.

The museum is open from May to September and can cater for groups. There is a small gift shop selling attrative wooden items ranging from wind chimes and fruit bowls to toys. Call 0033 684741310 or 0033 384258177 for information or contact@museemaquettebois.fr or http://www.museemaquettebois.fr

A fine way to complete your day in that area is to take a cruise on Le Louisiane, the paddle steamer that takes you for commented trips along the Lac de Vouglans, a beautiful, 35 km long remote wooded lake. (Telephone 0033 384254678 for details.)

The Sunday Times reviewer claimed that ‘This could be the best diet book ever written’, referring to John Humphry’s The Great Food Gamble.  So true!

Read the chapter ‘Fear of Fish’ and you’ll shun that lovely rich-coloured salmon. I almost wept as I read his description of the sea bed where a fish farm had been a year before. His details of how the salmon live are terrifying.

Fish, chicken, meat, eggs, fruit … it all looks very different when his incisive and knowledgeable treatment is applied to the way we have changed our food production habits over the last century.

The paperback is heavy reading but I would put it on a ‘must read’ list and there are lovely light touches like when, for example, he describes his diving experience.

The last chapter, read alone, is sufficient warning. Humphrys, in effect, interviews himself – one voice the convinced man speaking for a new look at what we do to our food – the other a devil’s advocate coming up with and demolishing all the stock rejoinders. It is most convincing.