BOOK ENDS: CURIOSITY OF WHAT'S IN A NAME.

BREWER'S CURIOUS TITLES COMPILED BY IAN CROFTON (CASSELL pounds 14.99) I CAN see this book turning into a Christmas parlour game in which we all get to guess where the titles of books, films, plays, poems and paintings came from.

Of course, saying the Bible or Shakespeare would guarantee you a good score - as in, say the Sidney Poitier film The Lilies Of The Field (Matthew) or Brave New World (The Tempest).

You may know that Heart of Midlothian is both a novel by Sir Walter Scott and the name of an Edinburgh football team but the original 'heart' was the tollbooth prison in the city.

You may also know that Noel Coward took the title for his play Blithe Spirit from Shelley's poem To A Skylark.

But how many could identify the source of Gone With The Wind as an Ernest Dowson poem called Non Sum Qualis Eram...?

You could also have a competition to find out who knows the longest and daftest title.

My favourite contender would be: The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as They Were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-tension Line StepdownTransformer.

This extraordinary stream of gobbledegook is apparently a piece of music by avant garde American composer LaMonte Young.

Ian Crofton says he has concentrated on titles 'that are curious in themselves or have a curious story behind them'.

The only problem is that once you start browsing through the 1,500 entries it's hard to stop.

BLOOD OF VICTORY BY ALAN FURST (WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON pounds 12.99) IF you have a taste for classy spy novels filled with enigmatic characters, then Furst is your man.

I A Serebin is a Russian living in exile in Paris as Europe is engulfed in the Second World War. He is also just the man British Intelligence needs for a very special operation.

The plan is to try to prevent Rumanian oil supplies from reaching Nazi Germany and Serebin is sent off on a journey that takes in Istanbul, Bucharest, Belgrade and wild places up on the Yugoslav border.

As Serebin contacts potential agents in all walks of life, you can feel the cold breath of betrayal and danger on the back of his neck.

He decides that it is too difficult to blow up the wells, so the plan is to block the Danube and prevent tankers from reaching Germany.

At least Serebin has the comfort of sexy, beautiful Marie-Galante, who may be married to a French diplomat but is very happy to be in his bed.

Furst's cast of exotic characters is always fascinating and so is his grasp of what life was like in the shifting, uncertain world of mid-European politics.

Furst is good at action but even better at atmosphere in this intriguing, tense novel.