Curated Secrets, the companion blog to our favourite recent book Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries, has increased in activity of late. In addition to the report on Freemasonry at Downside that we mentioned before, there has been a rumination on the Third Reich as Gesamtkunstwerk and a post about the attempt to artificially re-Saxonify the English language, which led to such interesting creations of words such as “wheelsaddle” for bicycle and “cellar-thane” for butler. The latest post is on the opium dens of old Singapore, an incongruous concept for those of us whose only conception of the South-east Asian city is as one of the most tightly run and well-managed states in the world.