By Luna Gradinšćak Milorad Pavić (1929-2009) once said that in his life he experienced something which most famous writers get only after death. Certainly, he thought of glory and fame, which he lived to achieve. And it is true: his Dictionary of the Khazards (1984; English translation 1988) at the very beginning sold […]
The King James Version of the Bible was first published on this day, 2 May, in 1611. This is arguably still the definitive English translation of the Bible, containing a lyricism and beauty of phrasing which many find largely absent from the more recent translations of the Bible into English. Although […]
The word for a book-lover is a ‘bibliophile’, a word first recorded in print in 1824. Alternatively, there is the word ‘bookworm’, which is of an altogether more ancient pedigree: it first appears in 1580. But what words should every good bibliophile and bookworm know? Here are some of our […]
The Easter weekend is upon us, so we’ve turned our literary sights to those words which have an Easter connection. Got your eggs and your hot cross buns at the ready? Then why not sit back, have a bite to eat, and gorge yourself on these literary facts. If you […]
We came across a nice site that tests your vocabulary in a short ‘quiz’ (of sorts) that takes only a few minutes to complete. It’s an interesting little test, because it will calculate (by which we really mean ‘estimate’) your vocabulary, or total number of words which you could practically […]