Chapter & Verse

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Wayles Brown seeks to locate a story about a boy of English and Hindu parentage who encounters the word “Eurasian” and asks his teachers what it means. They say evasively that he will understand when he is older, but he should never forget that Jesus loves him.

Joe Walsh hopes that someone can identify the poem in which a gentian is described as being “a deep and hurtful blue.” D.H. Lawrence may be the poet, he notes, “but neither ‘Bavarian Gentians’ nor anything else I can find contains that phrase.”

“British whodunit [and] Bradshaw” (July-August). Bettina Arnold was the first of several readers to suggest The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy Sayers; although Bradshaw is not specifically mentioned, Nicholas Puner confirms that novel as the one he was seeking. He thanks Ruth Mandalian and those who suggested Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, Mike Halpern and others who suggested Sir John Magill’s Last Journey and additional works by Freeman Wills Croft, and James Durham, who suggested The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.

You might also like

The Evolutionary Case for Exercise

The off-label prescription from our hunter-gatherer ancestors

Art Across Borders

At the Lahore Biennale, artists respond to the climate crisis. 

Football: Harvard 35-Holy Cross 34

The Crimson outlasts the Crusaders. Next up: Princeton

Most popular

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Historian Alexander Keyssar on why the unpopular institution has prevailed 

The Evolutionary Case for Exercise

The off-label prescription from our hunter-gatherer ancestors

The Teen Brain

It’s a paradoxical time of development. These are people with very sharp brains, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them...

More to explore

America's Housing Problem—Explained

America’s housing problem—and what to do about it

How Does the Brain Interpret Language in Real-Time?

New research on how the brain uses sounds to form words and create meaning.

Ecological Edges: Darren Sears’s Watercolor Landscapes

The surreal, artistic cartography of Darren Sears