My grandmaster colleague James Plaskett has two passions, the pursuit of the mythical giant octopus (ongoing) and a fascination with coincidence. Is the latter just a concatenation of unrelated circumstances, or does it have some deeper meaning, signifying something in the air at a particular time? How, for example, does one explain the virtually simultaneous, yet certainly isolated, discovery of the calculus by Newton in England, Leibnitz in Germany and Kowa Seki in Japan?

So Plaskett would, I am sure, be intrigued by the coincidental publication by two quite different publishing houses, of two books, both by American authors, about simplification, liquidation...