I used to be taught by a teacher who insisted on apostrophising everything. He would always refer to the ‘phone and the ‘papers, the punctuation point standing in for the missing tele and news. The habit was at the same time wondrously fastidious and gloriously silly. It would be …
In his 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Dr David Reuben, a physician and surgeon, described chastity belts as an “armoured bikini” with “a screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation.” …
Hans Christian Anderson (1805 – 1875) The wonderfully weird writer of fairy-tales declared his love for many prominent, ultimately unavailable women. He enjoyed visiting prostitutes, but only to sit and chat with them. He died unmarried and a virgin and was so terrified about being buried alive he insisted …
When Samuel Beckett lived briefly in Berlin, his regular haunt was a restaurant called the Giraffe. While sitting there one day after finishing his meal, he was asked by his waiter “Why is there no expression of hope in your work?” After a trademark Beckett silence, he picked up …
In 1939, Max Factor Jr created The Kissing Machine or Mechanical Osculator. This came about after workers who were previously employed to test the indelibility of the lipstick- in essence having to count the number of kisses it took on tissue paper before the lipstick wore off, quickly got …
Anthony Ward, a British commodities trader who set up a hedge fund specialising in chocolate, earned himself the nickname Chocfinger, by analogy with the Bond villain Goldfinger, who tried to take control of US gold reserves. Chocfinger didn’t go as far as his namesake, but he did have many …
Taken from Ad mulieres ferrarienses by a Giovanni Michele Savonarola (1384-1462) which was probably written in 1450. If a woman walks over a garden bed or a field within six weeks of giving birth, then nothing will grow on it in the next few years, or everything will perish. …
As England became more prosperous in the 16th century there was a renewed focus on etiquette and manners. As befitting the influence of the renaissance this was also a time which saw a renewed interest in ‘household ordinances and serving manuals’- namely a series of Anglo-Latin courtesy poems which …
René Descartes (1596–1650) the French philosopher, mathematician and writer is perhaps the only example of a sexual eccentricity changing the history of Western thought. For René “I think, therefore I am” Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women which he believed came from a childhood fascination with a cross-eyed playmate …
In a fine example of nominative determinism, the lawn mower was the creation of a British gardener named Budding. As foreman in an English textile plant, Edwin Budding was familiar with a new rotary shearing machine used to cut nap off cotton cloth. In the 1820s, he wondered if …
