===[[The Knitter's Dictionary: Knitting Know-How from A to Z by Kate Atherley]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Crafts|Crafts]], [[:Category:Reference|Reference]]
I've been knitting for well over sixty years, following patterns of varying complexity with success. I've knit Aran sweaters, socks by the dozen and I'm currently knitting blankets for a charity to sell. There hasn't been an occasion when I've been stuck and people have often come to ''me'' for help when ''they've'' been stuck. Would a knitter's dictionary really be of any help to me? I was surprised by just how much I got out of it. [[The Knitter's Dictionary: Knitting Know-How from A to Z by Kate Atherley|Full Review]]
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Melissa Craig should have been getting on with writing her latest mystery novel but she'd been sidetracked into working on the script for a pantomime. It wasn't a traditional panto, but a spoof for the birthday party of a local millionaire, to be held on Halloween. It's got all the hallmarks of a mystery ''and'' a pantomime and it looks as though cast and audience are all in for a good time with the rehearsals being held in a luxury hotel. Well, they were until one member of the cast turns up dead in the cellar at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs. What was he doing there and why is the hotel manager acting so strangely? [[Murder at the Manor Hotel (Melissa Craig 4) by Betty Rowlands|Full Review]]
[[image:3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Science Fiction|Science Fiction]]
Apparently the term ''space opera'' was coined in 1941 as a pejorative. It was borrowed not from the high-brow musical art form, but from the common or garden 'soap opera'. It related to a particular kind of science fiction which the coiner (one Wilson Tucker) described as a ''hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn''. It would be fifty years later before the term started to be re-appropriated to cover – if still the same themes of distant futures, military conflict, heroism and a simplistic set of values – more literary, more expansive works. The term is now taken as compliment. [[Salvation by Peter F Hamilton|Full Review]]