Other Men's Flowers

Q: Why do Jewish Mothers make great parole officers? A: They never let anyone finish a sentence . Why aren’t Jewish Mother jokes funny any m...

Several of my more devout friends have complained that Other Men's Flowers , while purporting to be a veritable compendium of literary r...

In 1951 the 28-year-old Peter Ustinov got the part of Nero in Quo Vadis . He was required to sing a lament to the burning Rome and, as it w...

A dozen tactful phrases used to intimidate voice-over artistes: Mmm, very good. Can you do it like Michael Palin? Well, we did want Felicity...

As the father of the bride I would now like to reply to the best man’s toast and propose the health of the happy couple This indeed is a pro...

I’ve never liked poetry much. I find that anything which is not prose and doesn’t have a rhyme here and there, or go umty-tumpty-diddley-dum...

When I was in the army I encountered a sergeant called Foulmouth O'Houlihan; for a soldier to to acquire such a soubriquet was exception...

When one imagines the sort of dangers that journalists in war zones face daily, it seems rather feeble of John Sweeney—who had at one time r...

It seems a pity to quote hoax entries in Conservapedia , the leading source of misinformation for the not very bright, because this increase...

The OED says this is an arbitrary formation, probably related to hocus-pocus, hoky-poky. Other, more entertaining, suggestions are that it ...

Episode 8 went out for the first time twenty-eight years ago; this was The Psychiatrist , in which Sybil Fawlty was so impressed by the meda...

It is depressing to read the demented ramblings of those American commentators, both amateur and professional, who seek to justify the worsh...

It is a sound business axiom that an entrepreneur starting up a business must decide exactly what his aim is. In the retail trade this means...

Photographed over Laura, South Australia © Tina Moore Actually what we have here is a fine cumulonimbus capillatus which was the April Cl...

I realise that I chose rather obscure First Lines and Last Lines and that some highly literate people were unjustifiably dissatisfied with...

Last year I posted a note of the captions to some of Thurber’s drawings without showing the drawings, thus irritating some unfortunate peop...

The admirable Martin Gardiner (not to be confused with the equally admirable Martin Gardner ) maintains on his website for the delight of al...

A much admired competitor in the 1907 Peking to Paris car "challenge" was a Frenchman called Auguste Pons, who had to withdraw wh...

At breakfast a couple of weeks ago—toast very sparingly spread with Patum Peperium (The Gentleman’s Relish), if you must know—I was glancing...

I noted last July that many English words which end in och or ock represent unattractive or uninteresting things. Here’s another trio of le...