And the vampire drives a Jaguar

 

    I had not expected to be reading a book set in the Bodleian Library and featuring vampires and witches, but that is what I am doing today.

    Being Hallowe'en weekend, I took from the shelves Edith Wharton's ghost stories The Demanding Dead and Kipling's Selected Stories in order to re-read his beautiful, perfect "They", but then the postie arrived with a fat parcel and in it a proof copy of a book not due out 'til February - "I'll have a quick look at the first page" says I, "and see what it's like", and now here we are 90 pages in and everything else is going to have to wait.

 

    For your information, of the central characters in Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, the witch is a historian of science, the vampire is a geneticist (though they are often nowadays physicists, the book says, particularly those of the particle variety, so I shall be looking closely at Dark Puss the next time I see him....), and they meet in Duke Humfrey's Reading Room in the Bodleian [I love the little reader's ticket inside the cover!] - oh, and the vampire drives a black Jaguar but frequently gets around Oxford by less conventional means...

 

   As I say, I hadn't planned to start on this 600-pager, but now that I have, I'm off to read on - and let no-one get in my way.