The Bishop's Palace, Wells

A picnic lunch today at The Bishop's Palace, Wells.

The Pilgrim statue - inscription below

Here's a close-up of The Pilgrim's face .. it rather reminds me of ..

China Mieville

Wells Cathedral from The Bishop's Palace garden

If you know what this flower is, could you tell me in the comments?

Update: thanks guys, it's an Allium.

Your author and his wife

"The Last Days of New Paris" has an Amazon page, but no-one seems to know when it will be available. August?

"June 1940 following Paris’ fall to the Germans, the villa of Air-Bel in Marsailles, is filled with Trotskyists, anti-fascists, exiled artists, and surrealists.

"One Air-Bel dissident decides the best way to fight the Nazis is to construct a surrealist bomb.

"When the bomb is accidentally detonated, surrealist Cataclysm sweeps Paris and transforms it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic."

You had me at 'surrealist bomb'.

Can you be too super-secret?

In Terry Hayes' excellent and scary thriller "I Am Pilgrim", the hero works for a super-secret and totally deniable organisation called 'The Department'. Basically it audits the spies - with few restrictions on what it can do.

In China Miéville's wonderful "The City and the City" there's a super-secret organisation called Breach which has almost unlimited power in its bizarre domain.

Operatives of these super-secret organisations have a problem, it seems to me. Probably no-one has heard of their secret organisation, nor are they permitted to identify themselves with it.

So how then do they gain authority to interview people, task military/police assets and generally grab the logistical resources they need?

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Semi-spoiler: I'm still wondering how easy it would be to create from scratch a synthetic version of a deadly virus. Once fabricated, the deployment mechanism in "I Am Pilgrim" seems horribly plausible.