He set up pyramids of plates to crash when people passed them, and rigged a mirror in a hat shop so that, when each matron posed simperingly before it, the glass cracked from side to side.

ECONOMIST: Jonathan Routh

Perhaps he is neither, just an orphan who carries with him the picture of his handsome parents, killed in a car-crash near the pyramids when he was a boy, together with an abundance of good will which he showers on others.

ECONOMIST: New novels from France: The young and the restless | The

Along the way, he exposes readers to early British civilisation, Egyptian pyramids, ancient Assyria and the Kingdom of Benin in the 13th century.

ECONOMIST: Japanese cartoons