I love the quotation, "Blessed are those who can laught at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused," and I got to wondering who originally said it. So far as I can discover, nobody knows. But in the course of my search I found several other quotations about laughter (thanks to Read more... )

from Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett ( Read more... )

I'm almost done with this MS--just putting some polish on the sidebars, including one on the amber trade. And I simply cannot resist sharing this bit from Pliny's chapter on "Amber: The Many Falsehoods That Have Been Told About It":

Demostratus calls amber "lyncurion," and he says that it originates in the urine of the wild beast known as the " ( Read more... )

And you want to make a living at it ( Read more... )

I've been copy-editing a middle-grade biography of Thurgood Marshall and, I admit, have not been entirely enjoying the job--it's taking more time than I'd anticipated, thanks to the necessity of fact checking, and I'm itchy to work no other things. But work is work--and sometimes it's even inspiring (as, indeed, Marshall's life and achievements ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to post these quotes from Thursday Next: First Among Sequels for about a month, so here at last is Thursday addressing the Council of Genres after a new form of interactive book (i.e., novel meets reality TV) is proposed in an attempt to remedy falling readership figures (p. 204):

"Humans like stories. Humans need stories. ( Read more... )

I've completed and turned in book three of the Life in Elizabethan England series. In the chapter on recreation and celebrations, I was able to use a bit of the following passage, but not the whole thing--and it's just too delightful not to share (in spite of being written by arch-Puritan ultra-bourgeois killjoy Philip Stubbes--or maybe that just ( Read more... )

Here is an excerpt from Dame Juliana Berners's Booke of haukynge, huntyng and fysshyng. Yet more evidence that Virginia Woolf was wrong when she said of pre-Restoration women writers that "if they wrote themselves, ... they did not dare to put their names to what they wrote, and it has vanished" (not to mention her assertion that "nothing is known ( Read more... )

Today I have read Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, bunches of Thomas Nashe, numerous sonnets and other lyrics by diverse poets, many snatches of Shakespeare, several excerpts from William Harrison's Description of England and Paul Hentzner's Travels in England, and--with much rejoicing at finding the complete text online--A Sweet Nosegay, ( Read more... )

from The Light FantasticIn fact, the hero even at this moment galloping towards the Vortex Plains didn’t get involved in this kind of argument, because they didn’t take it seriously but mainly because this particular hero was a heroine. A redheaded one ( Read more... )