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Sayers definitely manages in her earlier novels in her aim to put psychology into the detective story (Unnatural Death, Bellona Club, Murder Must Advertise, and of course Gaudy Night) but i don't think it really succeeds in the way she wanted until Busman's Honeymoon. Because in that novel, at the very end, she finally takes the catharsis of the detective story apart. It's not triumphant and victorious to solve the puzzle; it's a trigger, it's horrifying to be complicit in a system of destruction. She wrote those final chapters brilliantly and brings the mystery to a close in a way that closes both Harriet's and Peter's character arcs across an entire series, which is kind of a remarkable feat.

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— Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan as Shantipriya and Om Prakash Makhija in Om Shanti Om (2007)

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OH

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tragically cannot find a source for this that isn’t pinterest but edward petherbridge and harriet walter swapping accessories on the set of have his carcase…

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Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal

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maomao when every important figure in the empire keeps asking for her help

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Mary Crawford is that popular girl who takes you to a party out of pity and then leaves you half drunk and vulnerable next to some handsy jock.

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I'm reading Mansfield Park properly for the first time and omg there are actual people who dislike FANNY????!!!!!! How? Why? In what universe?????

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do you ever think about bunter also having bad moments bc of the war, and peter noticing and doing his best to help out in his own peter-y way? because that's what's on my mind today and I'm Emotional

Hello, friend; I too am Emotional about the intertwined histories of Bunter and Peter and the War, and here is my theory. My theory is that living with and working for Peter is Bunter’s therapy. 

Here is my evidence, starting at the end of DLS’ writing. The only time, as far as I recall), when we see Bunter responding to events based on wartime instincts is during the nocturnal uproar at Talboys, with running around and screaming… and Bunter comes rushing downstairs with the poker, and “brings his weapon to the present” when he sees Peter in charge of the situation. (I love them.)

Now. Going back to the beginning of their association, as recounted in Busman’s Honeymoon: Bunter worked as quickly as possible to “wrangle himself out” (to quote the Dowager Duchess’ vulgar way of putting things) of a permanent situation and an assured future, living near his mother and with promises of advancement, in favor of tracking down a mentally fragile scion of the nobility who made him a promise in a foxhole. And he marches in and takes charge. He commits himself entirely to Peter, at a time when the question of whether or not Peter will ever be functional is – to put it politely – unresolved. Bunter views this as a preferable alternative to his comfortable and conventional future. That says a great deal, I think, about Bunter’s own difficulties in readjusting to civilian life.

In both Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness, Peter is shown in flashback-inducing situations, and Bunter is shown as fairly unfazed. He adapts quickly to Peter’s nightmares, assuring him that the noise of sappers is of their own men, that they’re “safe as houses.” (Ugh, my heart.) And then he literally has to drag Peter out of quicksand in a fog (let us recall trench warfare, here) and by the time we catch up with Bunter in the aftermath, he is all cleaned up, fed and cheerful and preparing shaving water. And then there are all the conversations we don’t hear, in Murder Must Advertise and elsewhere. It’s a truism to say that one of the things that rendered WWI traumatic is that it couldn’t be talked about. (A lot of historical scholarship in the last 20 years has complicated that truism, but let’s let it stand for now as Mostly True.) And Peter and Bunter do. One of the many lines in Gaudy Night that punches me in the heart every single time is where Peter says to Harriet “I got so far as saying to Bunter one night: ‘Here we go, Sergeant; it’s back to the army again.’” Cue spiritual wailing from me, because this implies that, in the two-person household of Lord Peter Wimsey and Mervyn Bunter, the War is never a taboo topic. It’s something that shadows them both. It’s something that’s changed them both. And it’s something that they learn to live with together. 

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“One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly. “Num…?”- a particular which notoriously “expects the answer No.” Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for “polite negatives,” replied, still more briefly, “Benigne.””

—

-Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers (via summersanginme)

#wimsey #please #are we to assume she was saying thank you then or #gaudy night #harriet #you win (via @zooeyscigar)

I Am Not A Latinist but my mental translation is “thanks but no thanks.”

(via talkingpiffle)

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It was such an anticlimax. I almost wished I’d never done it. That’s why meeting you was such fun. You made it meaningful.

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currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883

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oh the uskerty post reminded me! the whole bit where arthur tries to talk like a guy in a bar. there is that scene in the plymouth express episode where hastings talks to the suspect at the bar and the two are so similar to me, almost like arthur based his concept of a bar conversation on that scene

Ask and it SHALL BE GIVEN