Chapter & Verse

Janice Weiss asks where Benjamin DeMott may have written that literature is “an elegant clockworks that tells no time.”

Marcia Barrabee hopes someone can surpass the references she’s examined by providing an origin for “naked as a jaybird.”

Robin Leidner seeks a source for a quotation in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers—“If she bid them, they will go barefoot to Je­ru­salem and visit the Great Cham’s court”—which has already foiled many members of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society.

Michael Purtell requests sources for two quotations: “God’s might and Moham­med’s miracles are my companions” and “The young men will go fight, married men will make arms and transport supplies, women will make tents and uniforms.”

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cam­bridge 02138. Readers seeking texts of poems or passages identified for others are asked to include a stamped, self-addressed, legal-sized envelope with their requests.