With our customary, contemporary arrogance, we like to believe that the world was created just this morning, and that anything of importance was invented after breakfast. Our literature is overstuffed with what can be described as caper stories and we delight in them, in the belief that they are fresh and new. But actually, the first capers were not stories at all, but real life exploits performed by primitive man in his efforts to evade the sabre-tooth tiger. From thereon, the writers took over - and nobody better than Mark Twain.