I accidentally came across the extraordinary figure of Ambrose Bierce through a cynical observation I happened to read in a magazine; ‘politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.’ I looked him up and out and have since been dipping into his The Devil’s Dictionary (for example, his definition of ‘dictionary’ = ‘A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.’). But it is his short stories above all that have caught my attention. I started with his extraordinary An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge and am now firmly hooked. There is more than a little of the Edgar Allan Poe about Bierce (military service included), but the mysteries of Poe’s death in New York are surely bettered by the mystery of Bierce’s disappearance in Mexico – if, that is, that was where he disappeared…