Fox, Kate. Watching the English (2014 ed). p. 499 Bottom. The Self-deprecating Insult Rule Speaking of privileged schoolchildren and the English art of indirectness, here is a quote I came across in a posh magazine from a mother whose daughter was in the same house as Kate Middleton (n...

Looking to place a book read circa 2000 about a couple who move to a cottage in the country, where the woman was an artist and the man was a music producer (I think, bit vague now), and the man has a history of drug use. They meet a local man who had some kind of magical/supernatural power which ...

The story I'm looking for I read in the first half of the 2000's, I'm fairly certain the title had the word "Vesuvius" in it, but I'm not absolutely sure. It was a short novel, not more than an inch thick. The story was set in Pompeii just before the famous eruption; the main character was a yo...

I'm trying to find a comic/graphic novel I once saw, but do not remember its name nor author. Here are some things are remember (or think I remember): It was monochromatic, but instead of the normal black, used a light brown/tan as primary color. Probably took place on a beach. Was about a tro...

At the start of the novel Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson, one of the characters, Makeda, is looking for a new place to live. A certain Milo rents out "units" in what he calls "warehouse living" and shows Makeda what the facilities look like. Makeda thinks to herself, I'd heard about his kind. ...

Gustav Schwab‘s Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece (OT: Die schönsten klassischen Sagen des Altertums) is at least to the German audience the encyclopaedia of Roman and Greek mythology (despite its title). Gustav Schwab translated and adapted the most famous works (Aeneid, Iliad etc.) of the ancie...

The poem "Some Like Poetry" by Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska is a musing lament about the unpopularity of poetry among the general population. The middle verse consists of a series of similes which compare liking poetry to liking various other things: but one also likes chicken soup with n...

The young man in the question takes his bride to his home in the countryside to meet his family. The author describes the following scene in exquisite detail:- It's night and the entire family is sitting on the porch of their house the brother of the protagonist challenges him to a wrestling ma...