Whispering Gallery, Issue 157

The sight of medieval Russia’s wooden cities astonished contemporary travellers, including the men of St Mary’s. Our article ‘A Carpentry Culture’ concentrates on the dominance of wood as a building material for houses, churches and fortifications, giving readers of The Ringed Castle the background to the visual appearance of the places in the novel.

Our remarkable, long-running series on the cover art of Dunnett’s novels concludes in this issue with an overview of the foreign-language editions of The House of Niccolò. The study of codes, and the art of writing and solving them, is a theme that runs through The House of Niccolò and The Lymond Chronicles: we focus on the skills of Nicholas and Lymond in creating and deciphering hidden messages.

The possibility that Güzel may be a proponent of the Bektashi tradition is explored, a member takes a child’s perspective on reading The Lymond Chronicles, and we publish the winning entry from this year’s Short Story Competition.

Contents of Whispering Gallery 157

• The Chairman’s Column
• Trustees’ Notice Board
• Solver of Ciphers and Maker of Codes: the Cryptic and the Cryptological
• A Carpentry Culture
• ‘What am I missing?’, part 5
• Reading Lymond: A Child’s Perspective
• The Plan de Bâle, part 4
• ‘Collapse’
• Güzel and the Bektashi Tradition
• Wrapping Up Dunnett
• A Dunnett Lexicon
• Members’ Page
• Talking Point
• A Close Read
• That’s Relevant!

Published December 2022