OK, first off, I need to start this post with a confession. I found out about the Prisoner of Zenda from a comment on this blog.  Yes, up until a few months ago I had never heard of it.  I don’t know how I (historical literature obsessed freak that I am) managed to miss it.  It’s had eight film adaptions after all, launched an entire literary genre (the Ruritanian romance) and added the term ‘Ruritanian’ to our language! Once I realised the dreadful gap in my literary knowledge, I was determined to fix it.  No luck at the Wellington Public Library, no luck in any bookstore I popped in to in NZ.  And then, in a secondhand bookstore just down the street from ThreadDen in Melbourne – success!      And, best of all, it was the only book in the shop that wasn’t Au$20 (really, I thought that books were exorbitantly expensive in NZ, but Oz is even worse!). So, here is my copy of The Prisoner of Zenda, read from cover to cover …