The John and Muriel Higgins Home Page

Fuel for learning
… if I can without strain find 555 paraphrases of an 8-word sentence, then several thousand million paraphrases of a 50- to 60-word sentence is reasonable. … Why has Mother Language showered us with so many ways of expressing meanings?

Power to the pupils
... “Who were your teachers?” I asked him, thinking he might have had a native speaker in his school class. “My teachers?” he said, “my teachers were Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Gregory Peck.” Pretentious little git, you may be thinking, but there was not much wrong with his English.

English Homographs and text-to-speech algorithms
…Text-to-speech has made huge advances on the robotic voice we have associated over the last twenty years with Professor Stephen Hawking. … However, it is clear that the handling of homographs remains problematical.

I speak analogue; you hear digital
… In effect what we are doing here is to have the candidate give the assessor a listening test. We are certainly making the assessor behave more like a listener dealing digitally with the question "What is the candidate trying to tell me?" rather than like a judge dealing in an analogue way with the question "How well can the candidate make that sound?"

Artificial unintelligence
…While computers possess randomness, they can to some extent do without intelligence…

The Drachenland Fable
... people were discussing the integratioon of computer activities into classwork. Looking round the room, I wondered why everybody was looking so glum. Would they still be so glum if the topic were, say, singing?

The Birdcage books of Victor Canning

(Contribution to Mystery People online journal, September 2017)

…The three best of the Birdcage series, Firecrest, The Rainbird Pattern and Birdcage, constitute some of the best storytelling of the century.

Andrew Garve and Soviet Russia

(Entry in The Literary Encyclopedia)
... In his thrillers he has nothing good to say about communism and the Soviet system. However, given the leftist and on the whole rather charming idealism of his earliest work, I would still be surprised if he ever cast a vote for the Tories.

Peter O'Donnell & Modesty Blaise

(Entry in The Literary Encyclopedia)
... One gets the sense that O’Donnell is writing for the kind of reader who does not sit down to read a book at a sitting but one who reads for a few minutes before going to sleep or on a commuter train. It is something he may have learned from scripting comic strips, and it is a valuable talent in a novelist.

…It was this middle period work which drew the label “Buchanesque” from many critics. The Golden

The plots of Andrew Garve

(Contribution to Mystery People online journal, February 2018)

... When you read The Ashes of Loda, his 1965 thriller about a British journalist escaping from Moscow across Ukraine in January, you will surely want to put on an extra sweater, if not an overcoat, scarf and gloves, so convincing is the description of a Russian winter.

J. M. Scott
Extended version of entry in Wikipedia.

On Sea-Wyf and Biscuit ... Was this, as Scott maintained, a true story which he learned at first hand fictionalised just enough for the main actors to be unidentifiable, or a plausible made-up story to explain the documented small ads, or had Scott created the whole story, inserting the ads himself in order to supply a hook for the novel? Against the third account is the four year delay. If Scott had invented the story, why wait four years to publish?