What hero of fiction ever had a receding chin?
November 22, 1937, must have been a slow day for quirky news. Of all world events, the Editor’s choice for the final leading article – the whimsy to lighten the geopolitics – was the invention of a new surgical technique to cure receding chins. The leader writer was Peter Fleming, distinguished war correspondent and travel writer and older brother of James Bond author, Ian Fleming. His wide-ranging piece, The nose ought to have it, lamented the lot of the chinless minority and argued that society’s prejudices were better directed towards the snub-nosed. “It is indeed difficult to see any point in having a chin at all. You cannot smell with your chin. You cannot balance spectacles upon it,” he observed, quite reasonably. He bolsters his case with the unfairness of literature. “What hero of fiction has ever had a receding chin? Not one in this country. You might as well give your heroine a squint.” Tragically, his brother did not take up this challenge and we were spared a chinless Bond,
