With panache.

I was under the impression that the royal families of Gondor and Rohan regularly intermarried? There aren't two numenorean kingdoms to draw from. This seems to be more about the minutiae of ethnic chauvinism than social class anyway, to be a bit pedantic.

Sister-daughter: Tolkien had an allergy to words like 'niece' and 'nephew'.

Eowyn is the sister-daughter of a king, not some scullion or something. 'Wildly different social classes' is pushing it.

It would be a mistake to assume that if you assign people positions on an arbitrary political spectrum then those in the middle of it have no ideology. What a 'centrist' perceives to be pragmatism and realpolitik is defined by orthodoxy and convention and perpetuated by the pundits, lobbyists and advisors who embody…

A.A. Dowd

hmmm, yes. I have heard of some of those books. I actually found Gone With The Wind very engaging, especially once the chaos of the civil war took hold. I could see how the bigotry of the espoused worldview and the trappings of the period could make for unpleasant/frustrating reading though. Doubly so, for an…

It's maybe not as clear-cut as I implied in my post, but it is a fairly common criticism.

So, is your refusal to read Gone With the Wind because you've already read it or are you making some kind of exciting moral stand?

With regards to the Witches, it probably says something about Dahl's appeal that he can write a caricature of the feminist movement and it can still be read, and apparently enjoyed, by an A.V. Club staffer no less .

Which british kids shows have nudity in them? Because at the moment I'm thinking that you and I remember Postman Pat very differently.

To be even fairer or slightly less fair, (I lose track ) units of distance and time can be applied interchangeably (with appropriate translational factors) in relativistic physics.

No one said it was as offensive as those things, Captcha Reader was pointing out the how inconsistent other posters are in applying the 'it's just a joke' defence.
I think the reason it got on people's nerves is that there's a long history in the USA and worldwide of demagogues using similar rhetoric to brush aside…

"peans to the popular religion of people who consider themselves too smart for religion: science."
… This is a joke right? Surely the A.V. club isn't now rife with 'science is really a religion' types.

No

'Maurice' is indeed amazing, but I felt that I'd babbled enough without getting into the YA Pratchetts as well.

I've heard that from quite a lot of people, so it's probably just a quirk on my part, but I found them a bit slight and uninspired, especially "Making Money".

"Mort" is definitely the place to start for the Death/Susan sub-series (Death features a bit in the prior three books, but Pratchett didn't really have a handle on the character until Mort), which kind of dwindles out but gave us the "Reaper Man" which is one of his best.
"Small Gods" is his best stand-alone book.
GG…

Slightly downhill from there I'm afraid, although "Excession" is sporadically brilliant and there's only two that are actually bad ("Matter" and "Surface Detail").

Oops. I Got confused by the fact it won this year's Booker Prize.