180 English Language Notes THE “MAGNUS EFFECT”: NAMES IN THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND When (in December 1994) Mel whether he had conceived the Christian name of Ernest Ridley (a character in the 1988 play Hapgood) as a reference to The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoppard was quick with a denial — ssow asked Tom Stoppard ‘No, not at all. Goodness knows what I was thinking of.” Interest- ingly, however, he went on reinforce Gussow’s underlying assump- tion that his names had to be significant, reflecting that “Naming characters is a strange thing.” Furthermore, after dismissing some other hunches on Gussow’s part (this time relating to names in Arcadia), Stoppard admitted considerable satisfaction with the effect he had achieved (partly through “good luck”) through names: “The odd thing about these names is that they kind of det onate in a way that looks pre-planned! Although his wording leaves it unclear whether he was referring to the names of his characters generally, or only to those in Arcadia, Stoppard does seem to have wanted to make the most of names throughout his career, When (twenty years before his conversation with Gussow) he was questioned by Ronald Hayman about his tendency to repeat certain names from play to play, Stoppard replied: “The only vaguely interesting aspect of the whole matter is that I find it a serious block to be arbitrary about naming characters. There is a curious sense of their having to be correctly named.”2 A virtual obsession on Stoppard’s part with the naming of his characters is, I believe, particularly evident in one of his very ear- liest plays, The Real Inspector Hound: In this play every single name (and some of the characters have several) is wonderfully apt. In order to demonstrate this point, I have constructed what amounts toa comprehensive commentary. (This treats most of the charac- ters in the order of their appearance, although discussion ofthe murderer and his victim is reserved until the end.) I go on to sur- vey the range of strategies that Stoppard has used to make his names (to use his own odd and arresting term) “correct.” In con- clusion, I suggest that Stoppard’s brilliant naming is supremely relevant to the purposes of the play as a whole. If we can disregard the corpse on the stage-within-the-stag the first characters to appear are the two theatre critics, Moon and Birdboot. About half-way through Act One, Moon, frustrated byDecember 2005 his secondary status, plays on his name: “It is merely that it is not enough to wax at another's wane.” But the name of Moon carries more significance than Moon himself realizes, because (as Stoppard himself has explained) his name is that of a character killed by the hero in the film The Left Handed Gun — and is thus a clue to the fact that he will by the end of the play be eclipsed for- ever. Birdboot (as Stoppard has, again, explained) is named after the anti-heroic journalist (Boot) in Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop. Not surprisingly, given their striking (almost surrealistic) quality, along with Stoppard’s own explanations, commentators have paid a reasonable amount of attention to these first two names — it has been pointed out, for instance, that the name Birdboot seems to project its owner’s predatory and cavalier atti- tude to women.§ But the (ten) names of the seven remaining characters have remained unexamined. The next character to appear (and the first in the play-within- the-play) is Mrs Drudge. Clearly, in giving “the Help” (p. 8) her reductively descriptive name Stoppard is exposing the snobbery built into the traditional “country house” murder mystery, and mocking the stereotyping that characterizes the genre. The name “Hound,” being an obvious metaphor for the detective in pursuit of his prey, seems to have a similar function 7 (By the same token, it recalls the 1958-62 Hanna Barbera animated television series The Huckleberry Hound Show, in which Huckleberry is both a real hound and a Scotland Yard detective.) In the case of Stoppard’s “Hound,” however, what seemed so obvious at first proves mis- leading when Magnus claims to be the “real” Inspector. Para- doxically the name is (to use Stoppard’s term), “correct” chiefly because it is not. “Muldoon Manor,” the name of the country house in which the play is set (and the surname of its owner Albert, and therefore that of his wife Cynthia and brother Magnus) recalls the specific setting of A; Christie's The Mousetrap, “Monkswell Manor” (extending the joke initiated with “Mrs Drudge”).8 Appropriately enough, given this setting, the upper-class names of the characters in the play’s standard love triangle — Cynthia, her friend and rival Felicity, and Simon — place them in a world apart from Drudge, Hound (and, from the play-outside-the-play, Myrtle). But each one of these names has an aptness that extends bey Stoppard’s fairly simple parodic purpose, an aptness that wor182 English Language Notes underline the play's disorienting confusion of its theatrical and “real” worlds. The name Cynthia is of course that of a Greek goddess. It is one of the several appellations of the chaste huntress Artemis (called Diana by the Romans). While the play's Cynthia does appear to have remained celibate during the long absence of her husband Albert, her name seems ironic with respect to her responsiveness to the seductive approaches of Simon (and, once the besotted critic has crossed the footlights, Birdboot as well). But (as sister of Apollo, god of the sun), Cynthia/Artemis is also the moon goddess Selene who fell in love with the beautiful youth Endymion, and kissed him in his sleep. Stoppard seems to have recalled Keats's treatment of this story, according to which Endymion experiences the kisses of the goddess (whom he often addresses as “Cynthia”) in a rapturous dream: “I was distracted, madly did I kiss / The wooing arms which held me.”? Birdboot, incongruously in the light of his cynicism, tends to adopt a Keatsian tone where the actress playing Cynthia is concerned Seated in the stalls, and watching her kissing Simon (“their lips are glued,” according to the stage direction), he describes her as “beautiful — a vision of eternal grace, a poem” (p. 18), and later indulges in a series of stereotypically romantic exclamations: “Ah, the sweet madness of love” (p. 22), “for I only live but once” (p. 23), “the radiance, the inner sadness” (p. 23).10 Felicity’s name (meaning, of course, “happines tions ironi ”) also func ally, because her role in the play is to be disillusioned, vengeful, and (twice) to leave the room “in tears.” The suffix of her surname (“Cunningham”) may point to Felicity’s melodra- matic style, while the “cunning” component could reflect not so much upon the role as upon the shrewdness of the actress playing the part — a shrewdness we might infer from Birdboot's refer- ences to his meeting with her before the opening night.!! Names that one might assume to have been chosen merely because they are clichés in the kind of play Stoppard is parodying in his play- within-the-play, turn out to characterize the actresses, the real selves who (as it were) play a part in the real life of Birdboot. In giving his stereotypical “philandering coward” (p. 16) and ad” (p. 18) the surname “Gascoyne” Stoppard (again, parody- ing a stereotype) may have been exploiting negative associations arising from the fact that the natives of Gascony were notoriousDecember 2005 183 for being, as one early nineteenth-century commentator cited in the OED (Gascon n. 2.) puts it, “buoyant and boastful.” But it is Simon’s (albeit bland-seeming) Christian name that is particular- ly relevant to the concerns of both the play-within-the-play and the play as a whole. It recalls that of a character in Susanna Centi- livre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), in which the identity of one Simon Pure” (a virtuous Quaker) is assumed by the charming rogue Colonel Fainwell in his pursuit of his mistress.2 His success in applying this strategy is briefly endangered by the arrival of the real Simon Pure.!3 Thanks to Centilivre’s play, the expressions “the true Simon Pure,” “the real Simon Pure” (and the like) entered the language; they were (as explained in the OED, Simon Pure a.]) used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies to mean “the real, genuine, or authentic person or thing’— in other words, “the real McCoy.” Being a deceiving philanderer, Simon resembles Fainall pretending to be Simon Pure, rather than the “real” Simon Pure himself. His name, though it is to this extent implicitly ironic, is nevertheless also prophetic, because the deceiving Simon does come to share the fate of Magnus’s enemy “the real McCoy” (italics mine). As already noted, the name “Myrtle” distinguishes, via its lower-class connotations, Birdboot’s reallife wife from the on- stage characters of Cynthia and Felicity, But Myrtle’s name has like theirs, a finer appropriateness. Since the myrtle was sacred to Aphrodite (the goddess of love and fertility, and as such antithet ical to the virgin goddess Cynthia) Myrtle’s name works to under- line her incompatibility with the actress playing Cynthia. Birdboot's infatuation with what one might call his new “goddess,” the actress playing the part of Cynthia, not only displaces his prior infatuation with the actress playing Felicity; it also involves a rejec- tion of his wife. “Myrtle, farewell . . .” Birdboot muses from the stalls, once the curtain has fallen on Cynthia at the end of the first act of the internal play (p. 23). Itremains to consider the names of the murderer and his first victim, but here a preamble is required. In Stoppard’s virtuoso work (which leaves us wondering whether the play-within-the-play has swallowed up its frame or dissolved into it) each of these com- plementary roles is assumed in two dimensions. Thus in the play- within-the-play the murder victim is the Canadian William Herbert McCoy, while in the framing play (standing for reality) it184 English Language Notes is Higgs, the firststring critic of whom Moon is so envious. The murderer has no less than three identities in the play-within-the- play — or (more accurately) one real identity, one that is assumed, and one that is dubious. He is really Albert, Lady Cynthia’s long:lost husband. But, having disappeared from Mul- doon Manor and lived as an amnesiac in Canada (where he was impelled by an insult offered by McCoy to pursue the latter and murder him), Albert has returned to achieve his goal in the guise of his own half-brother Major Magnus. In the framing play that stands for reality, however, the murderer is Puckeridge, the third- string critic (and, as Weldon P. Durham has inferred, a playwright and actor!5) who has murdered his rival the firststring critic Higgs before the performance and (taking advantage of the role he has created for himself) gone on to murder both Birdboot and his remaining rival Moon (the former, as far as I can see, merely because he has got in the way).16 There are, therefore, five names to consider here — Puckeridge, Albert and Magnus (the murder- er’s), and McCoy and Higgs (the victim’s Puckeridge’s name is indubitably an apt one for a murderer: although its etymology is interestingly uncertain, the noun “puck- eridge” is (as explained in a note in the OED, puck n.2]), along with “puck” and “puck-bird,” one of the “rural names of the goat- sucker or nightjar” (a bird once thought to be responsible for the infection of animals with anthrax), and “the object of much oblo- quy and superstitious dread.”!7 The name of Puckeridge’s on-stage character, Albert (imper- sonating Magnus) may be intended to recall Prince Albert, to whom Queen Victoria was devoted not only in life, but also (more famously, perhaps) in death. The response offered by the melo- dramatically “anguished” Cynthia to all her suitors is “Don’t — I love Albert” (pp. 18, 35), or “Remember Albert” (p. 20). Her obsessiveness is comically evident when, misunderstanding Hound’s avuncular “I must ask you to put yourself comple my hands,” she replies “Don’t, Inspector, I love Albert” (p. 28). It is, however, “Magnus” that is probably the most interest- ingly-conceived of Stoppard’s names for his sinister mastermind and tiple murderer. As “Major Magnus” he recalls “Major Metcalf” of The Mousetrap — the character who, in the famous final twist of Christie’s play, turns out to be not a Major after all, but the detective (“You see,” Christie’s “Major” explains to theDecember 2005 female lead, “I'm a policeman”!8). Like Metcalf, Magnus claims to be “the real Inspector” — although what in Christie was an isolat- ed twist becomes a double deception in Stoppard’s play. (The first, Moon’s realization that the man playing Magnus is Puckeridge and the murderer, relates to the wider play. The sec- ond, Magnus'’s declaration that he is Albert, relates to the play- within-the-play.) “Major” is of course Latin for “greater,” and in replacing Christie’s “Metcalf” with “Magnus” (Latin for “great”) Stoppard provides a variation on the “Major Major” joke used by Joseph Heller in Catch 22. But Stoppard’s choice of the Christian name Magnus could have rather more to do with his wheelchair.!9 Magnus is described before he actually appears on stage by Mrs Drudge, first as “the wheelchair-ridden half-brother of her Ladyship’s husband” (p. 11, italics mine), and then as “the crippled half-brother of Lord Mul- doon who turned up out of the blue from Canada just the other day” (p. 13, italics mine). Magnus’s first appearance is heralded by “the sound of a wheelchair approaching down several flights of stairs with landings in between” (p. 19). When the wheelchair car- rying Magnus arrives on the stage (“at about 15 m.p.h.,” accord- ing to the stage directions) it knocks Simon over — at which point Magnus (who does eventually shoot Simon, and is already a murderer) goes on the defensive, asserting “I have witnesses” (p. 19). Once Birdboot has stepped into Simon’s shoes he is struck in a similar collision with Magnus, a collision he interprets as attempted murder (“Did you see that? Tried to kill me,” p. 36) — and Birdboot will indeed share the fictional Simon’s ultimate fate. Interspersed with these moments of farcical violence are Magnus’s attempts to seduce (or, rather, since he is really her hus- band Albert, test the fidelity of) Cynthia. “Care for a spin around the rose garden, Cynthia?” Magnus asks during the card-game (only to be refused, p. 21); and he poses the same question dur- ing the second card-game (p. 38), before Birdboot — having identified the corpse — is shot. It will be obvious that Magnus’s use of the term “spin” for an outing is comically appropriate in the context. But Stoppard may have wanted to remind us of Magnus’s wheelchair in this par- ticular way as an esoteric play on Magnus’s name. To explain: it could be argued that the phenomenon described by physicists as the “Magnus Effect” (according to which — as explained in a stan-186 English Language Notes dard dictionary of physics — “a lateral force [is] generated by a rotating body from altered pressure forces [.. .] the force [being] perpendicular to both the rotation axis and the direction of [.. -] motion”2!) is strongly suggested by what we might call the “effect” of Magnus’s arrivals on stage. Perhaps significantly, the term “spin” tends to be part and parcel of accounts and discussions of the Magnus Effect. The OED definition (Magnus 72 1.) is worth quoting in full: “the effect of rapid spinning on a cylinder or sphere moving through a fluid in a direction at right angles to the axis of spin, which results in a sideways force at right angles to both the direction of motion and the axis of spin and towards the side where the peripheral motion of the body is in the opposite direc- tion to its overall motion” (italics mine). Itis tempting, in the light of these associations, to interpret Magnus’s name as a clue to the extraordinarily indirect path he has taken to appease his jeal- ousy.22 The surname of the victim in the play-within-the-play, McCoy, is one of those that scarcely needs explication — although it might be noted that, since the expression “the real McCoy” is thought to have originated in Canada (or the United States),?5 it fits beautifully with McCoy's history as outlined by Hound (p. 29) .24 McCoy’s Christian names, “William Herbert,” offer more of achallenge. They could constitute an allusion to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whose importance lies in the fact that he could be the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” who was (according to an early seventeenth-century editor) “the onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.5 As we have seen, Stoppard’s names tend to have literary (and sometimes theatrical) associations, and “William Herbert” (as with Simon/Simon Pure) is resonant not only with these but also with the issue of true identity (which is, as I argue below, high- ly relevant) More strongly emphasized, however, is the name of the victim in the real world, where he is the firststring critic Higgs (the name is mentioned no less than eight times within the first two pages of dialogue, pp. 6-7). Itmight be argued that the significance of this name lies in its apparent lack of significance, its very ordinariness (the body, ironically, having the name of “a nobody”). Butit could also be that Higgs’s name, like Magnus’s, derives an esoteric sig- nificance from physics. In 1964, four years before Stoppard had completed The Real Inspector, the now-famous Edinburgh physicistDecember 2005 187 Peter Higgs hypothesized the existence of a particle that would explain the existence of mass, and thus inertia.26 The theory has been characterized in a recent issue of the New Scientist as the notion “that a gooey ‘Higgs field’ pervades the universe and endows matter with mass through the effect of Higgs particles.”27 Here is a textbook definition: An as yet hypothetical particle invoked to explain why the carriers of the elec- troweak force (the W and Z bosons) have mass. Quantum electrodynamics requires the photon to have zero mass [. ..] early attempts to develop an elec- troweak theory [. . .] seemed to require the equivalent bosons also to be mass- less (which was bad, since any such massless bosons would be as abundant and obvious in the Universe as photons are, and they are not.) Peter Higgs, in Edinburgh, and two Belgian researchers (. ..] (working together, but inde- pendently of Higgs) hit on the same idea for resolving this puzzle, in 1964. If there is an otherwise undetectable field (now called the Higgs field) filling the Universe, it could have associated with it a previously unknown kind of boson, the Higgs particle, which has mass, This would allow any photon-like particle to become massive by swallowing up a Higgs boson [.. . . .])28 It was not until 1972 that the particle was named after its inventor. Even so, since Higgs’s theory was published in 1966, Stoppard may have got wind of it when he was working on the play in 1967.2 If so, he might well have thought “Higgs” the right name for that thoroughly massive and inert object, a corpse — especially one whose identity is the key to the mystery that is con- stituted by his whole play. Furthermore, there is another aspect of the Higgs boson that might have appealed to Stoppard — its lack of “spin”! ‘The Higgs field differs from other fundamental fields, such as the electro- magnetic field, in being scalar, It has definite magnitude (a strength), but no direction. This means that the Higgs particle must have zer spin, unlike the particles which carry the forces of nature, such as the photon. Because the Higgs field has no preferred direction and is the same strength everywhere, it has no influence on us, except through the Higgs mechanism. If this material is relevant, it points to a beautiful appropriateness in Stoppard’s identification of Magnus’s victim with a particle lack- ing in the very direction, “spin” and force that are so characteris- tic of Magnus himself. While Stoppard has been consistent in choosing every one of his names in The Real Inspectorwith strong intent, he has employedEnglish Language Notes a great variety of (often overlapping) strategies. These include generic parody, the exploitation of etymology and other opportu- nities for word play, irony, and (above all) allusion. Stoppard alludes to all kinds of cultural material (including classical mythol- ogy, romantic poetry, high-brow novels, popular films, a television series), but his perhaps most telling literary references are to plays and playwrights (Centilevre, Christie and — though more obliquely — Shakespeare). His allusions to scientific concepts are somewhat surprising. While Stoppard’s debt to science in Hapgood (1988) and Arcadia (1993) is obvious and has been well- recognized, Stoppard himself has implied that this debt has been a product of a recent (and passing) interest — “a phase, like delin- quency, that one goes through.”83 “But his employment in The Real Inspector of the names “Higgs” and “Magnus” — names whose scientific associations are so metaphorically relevant to those who bear them — suggests that he was, to the contrary, beginning to be aware of the theatrical possibilities offered by physics more than twenty years before he was to exploit these possibilities to the full in Arcadia. To conclude: Stoppard’s ingenious naming is not just an end in itself. In The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard pursues two possi- ble applications of the adjective “real” (an adjective greatly emphasized in the final minutes of the play). The first is intimat- ed by the device of the play-within-the-play, which stands for the- atrical illusion as opposed to that which itis not — “real life.” (Mrs Drudge’s statement that, thanks to the weather, Monkswell Manor is “cut off for all practical purposes from the outside world” [p-12], may function as a sly intimation of this opposition.) The real existence (that is, the existence in the real world) of Birdboot and Moon is guaranteed by their status as critics, which means that they are necessarily external to the play they are to assess. But they fail (or at least refuse) to recognize this, and — foolishly (?) exchanging the reality they had as spectators for on-stage roles — they die. Their deaths on stage adumbrate the notion that the transition they have made is actually fatal of itself; the stage is death to reality (that is, to reality viewed as life in opposition to illusion). Magnus provides us with the same object lesson in reverse when, abandoning his role in the theatrical whodunit, he emerges as a literally murderous critic in the real world, But the play’s title (in common with “the real McCoy” and its eighteenth-December 2005 century equivalent, “the real Simon Pure”) introduces a second meaning, because it implies that a character’s reality depends on his or her having the right name. It could be argued that this must always be the case in a play, where names are in a sense the only reality. (Their peculiar value is suggested when Moon reads aloud from his program the name of Mrs Drudge before she herself announces it from the stage, p. 8, and later when he checks it for the name of God, p. 24.) If the reality of a character is (as Stoppard’s title implies) to be identified with a name, might we not conclude that names actually bestow character? If so, we would expect names to be determinative. As we have already seen, Stoppard suggests this notion over and over again in The Real Inspector (Moon “moons,” Birdboot gives his bird [Felicity] the boot, Magnus spins, Higgs has mass but no direction). Where names are determinative, mystery must depend on aliases. Thus Stoppard makes the whodunit that is the play-within-the-play dependent on the name of Magnus being an alias for Albert (and in the “red-herring” phase that precedes the play’s resolution, on the possibility that the name Simon is an alias). Since The Real Inspector Hound embodies a preoccupation with the relationship between names and reality, Stoppard’s ingenious naming must be counted as one of its most crucial dimensions. Kathryn Walls Victoria University of Wellington ACKNOWLEDGMENT Professor John Lekner and Emeritus Professor David Beagle- hole have kindly advised me on the physics at stake in this article. Despite their clarity and patience, however, my understanding has remained very much that of the scientifically uneducated layper- son. NOTES | Mel Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard (New York: Limelight Editions, 1995) 93-94. 2 Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard (London: Heinemann, 1977) 76. Stop- pard’s concern with names overlaps, of course, with his love of punning. Stop- pard’s puns are discussed (without reference to The Real Inspector) by Hersh Zeifman in “Tomfoolery: Stoppard’s Theatrical Puns,” Yearbook of English Studies (1979) 204-20.poiot 19 atp ut saxoxd inq Adadsns ¥ « auans 3 a2 WaqIy/si (HF ns Aoutanxa st us ut Aepd soa spy iu eionb ianbasqng ;, spiom jeuy 2 uusssod ‘(pareuSedun) sts ier y :dowpasnoyy ayy aU, 298 “ioads (Surg) wooyone IW aytdg 205 W s.preddoig 2tp yen weonuopt 2 1I (1) ¢ > aouanyur sup jonureg Temsquoyy,, s.uoopinyy osioaid aq DAB OF S: M HOA Many ‘hoxy BLGI ‘sassarg Arsta9i aTeDOSSy :uOpt QV Puotog ut “ULES “| 10191, s 0: 1 OTe OW 4 01 uosiad oN, :preddorg punddorg uo, Spras 1 Aq parensdeoua soda arp pur sou ay preddoig Aq p: 0) si p2 si OF basans ily “¢1 ‘S891 201 DIOR MAN) slg LayQ pub punopy sopadsuy poay ayy H sopedsuy ray ayy, ‘preddorg w 19 sty 01 siduds 12y (0 pey pur stp ns sem preddoag warp 4 UE PUDIS a4, Se) pouutojiod ray ‘punozy wopadsuy pay oy ¢ SaION aSenBurry ysySuq 061December 2005 French, 1958) 69. Stoppard’s debts to The Unexpected Guest are noted by Tim Brassell in Tom Stoppard: An Assessment (London: Macmillan, 1985) 94 15 “This scheming killer has written a playlet, hired a cast, rehearsed it, and, to complete the illusion of a play in progress, he has assembled an audience.” Weldon P. Durham, “Ritual of Riddance in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound,” 89-104 in John Harty IIL, ed., Tom Stoppard: A. Casebook (New York: Garland, 1988) 91, But not all critics agree that Stoppard’s plot is coherent. For an alternative view, see Richard Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery and the Clockwork (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1984) 49-54 \6 The name Puckeridge may, like Muldoon itself, owe something to Milligan’s Puckoon (cf.n. 8 [i]), thus functioning as a clue to Muldoon’s ulti- mate identity 7 Susan Rusinko has suggested the influence of Punch’s “Muggeridge” (p. 69) 8 p. 63. Stoppard’s treatment of The Mousetrap has been analyzed by Marvin Carlson in “Is there a Real Inspector Hound?” Modern Drama 36: 1 (March 1993) 43141 9 The wheelchair is borrowed from Christie's Unexpected Guest, although there the wheelchair belongs to the victim Warwick. whose dead body, rather like Higgs’s in fact, is seen on stage as the play begins. The audience of Christie's play is not meant to realize that Warwick (seen in his wheelchair from the back when the curtain rises, p. 1) is dead until his wife Laura announces the fact (p.2 20 Magnus is, rather similarly, described as having “turned up” (p. 13), and Mrs Drudge’s unfortunate choice of words is echoed (once Magnus has done so, with a vengeance) by Cynthia (p. 19), and then by Simon (p. 21) 21 Dipak Basu, ed., Dictionary of Material Sciences and High Energy Physics (Boca Raton: GRC Press, 2001) 193 22 His jealousy is clearly a projection of that of Puckeridge, the playwright 28 Ivor H. Evans, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, rev. edn. (London: assell, 1981) 694 24 MacGregor in The Unexpected Guest also returns from Canada — but whil his name (and his Canadian history) anticipate McCoy’s, he is the murderer and as such more like Magnus. 2 This claim of the early seventeenth-century publisher Thomas Thorpe is recounted and discussed by Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972) 124-25. 26 Peter Higgs described his discovery and its dissemination in a lecture given at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, Ann Arbor Michigan, on May 21, 2001. A video is available on the web (www.wlap.org/umich/mctp, conf/2001/sto2001/Higgs/). I am gratefull to Professor A. D. Kennedy of the School of Physics, University of Edinburgh, for alerting me to this source, 27 Celeste Biever, “Slipperiest Particle Gets Away Again,” New Scientist, June 28, 2003, 13. 28 John Gribbin, Q is for Quantum: Particle Physics from A to Z (London Phoenix Press, 1998) 215. 29 Stoppard has explained that the play “grew out of a few pages [he] wroteslish Language Notes is rather Mel Gussow, Si mistake: c e Gussow,