9. Wordplay

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This week's Wordplay
Solve this clue: "T E B Catches T W"
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The answer to last Week's Wordplay: T O T W H T F is F I

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"

Meaning: We can accomplish great things if we look at problems face on rather than being held back by doubt and fear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt made this expression famous in his 1933 inaugural address:

Most of Roosevelt's speech was written by Columbia University Professor Raymond Moly but it is believed that this part of the speech was not in the original, or at least not in this form. Some say that the writing of Henry David Thoreau inspired Roosevelt to add the "fear itself" line. An anthology of Thoreau's writing was apparently in Roosevelt's hotel room including a journal entry by Thoreau from 1851: "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear."

But Professor Moly himself pointed to Louis Howe as the source of the expression, but doubted that Howe (who favored detective novels) had been reading Thoreau. Instead he believed that Howe had likely seen it in a department store's newspaper ad some months before. It is possible that the ad was for Wanamaker's department store which ran a campaign in the New York Times during that period with each ad footnoted by an inspirational platitude - but no Wanamaker ad using Thoreau's phrase has been found to confirm if this is the case.

Thoreau, in turn, was most likely inspired by earlier writers including French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: "Nothing is terrible except fear itself" (1580); Francis Bacon: "The only thing I am afraid of is fear" (1623); and The Duke of Wellington: "The only thing I am afraid of is fear." (c.1832).
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10. Win This Book

How to be Both by Ali Smith

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From the Jacket
Man Booker Prize Finalist
Winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Costa Best Novel Award
Winner of the Saltire Literary Book of the Year Award
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Financial Times

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.


5 people will each win a paperback copy of How to be Both.
This giveaway is open to residents of the USA only, unless you are a BookBrowse member, in which case you are eligible to win wherever you might live.

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