This work explains the origins of the familiar and the unfamiliar in everyday speech and literature, including the colloquial and the proverbial.

This collection presents sayings both so usual that we use them without thinking, and so unusual that they bring us up short when we hear them.

Oscar Wilde's well-turned phrases and spontaneous insults still cause much amusement and admiration. This book contains quotes most of which are taken from Wilde's plays, novels and essays.

New Zealand, Africa, the Caribean and India. Clear explanations of genres, movements, critical terms and literary concepts are given - from irony to structuralism, from romanticsm to Science Fiction.

Few Victorian writers are as well remembered as Charles Dickens (1812-70).

The answers to these enquiries and thousands of others are revealed in this unique guide to every kind of alcohol, compiled by dedicated drinker and collector of little histories, Ned Halley, who is an award-winning writer on beer, a ...

This work offers remedies for all the ills known to 17th century society.

This work is a comprehensive listing of terms that refer to furniture - its style, manufacture and makers in all countries and cultures from earliest times to the present.