“I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.” The opening line from Breakfast at Tiffany's - the book by Truman Capote also included three of his short stories with those titles? That line could have been written for me...
Spot on, BB...and yes, a good opening line. Reminds me why I prefer original texts to bowdlerised films!
wow... I thought there must have been one earlier than that 1977 OK Whose birthday today celebrates as family man whose family name became a word in its own right?
no.... Clue: it was his birthday yesterday... his surname has become a word in its own right.... and he wrote something to do with Shakespeare....
I don't know when his birthday was, but Thomas Bowdler is the best known writer of expurgated Shakespeare...hence the term 'bowdlerised' (see an answer I gave BB above in relation to Breakfast at Tiffanys and the film version)
Why might the earliest mention of Valentine's Day as a day for lovers suggest a description of recent UK politics?
The original St.Valentine was a bishop who was executed by Emperor Claudius for conducting prohibited marriages - around the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, a time of increasing taxation, diminishing trade, and the bulk of Europe against them. History repeating itself?
not sure but starting with this: In ancient Rome, 13, 14 and 15 February were celebrated as Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival. This seems to be the basis for a celebration of love on this date. It was marked in a subtly different way in those days, however. According to Noel Lenski, classics professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, speaking in the National Geographic, young men would strip naked and use goat- or dog-skin whips to spank the backsides of young women in order to improve their fertility; an early IVF, if you will TBH I can't imagine Bojo, Gove, Farage and Leadsom naked....
I can imagine it - I just don't want to picture it. And I believe that Gove has a history of it from his University days in Aberdeen.
