Henry Hitchings Quotes

#1. Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a 'little pig', and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell's resemblance either to a pig's back or to a sow's glisteningly crinkled vagina.35

Henry Hitchings

#2. On loof, literally 'on rudder', was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion.

Henry Hitchings

#3. Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000.

Henry Hitchings

#4. He got Strahan to print fifty advertisements to be run in 'country papers', along with 250 showcards for booksellers' windows. Although none of this was expensive, the final account that Strahan presented was for more than £800, a sum that was not fully paid off until almost four years later. The

Henry Hitchings

#5. Dictionary he identifies 'what ills the scholar's life assail': 'Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail'. The last of these was always a genuine possibility: it was common for people owing even modest debts to be incarcerated, and several writers known to Johnson had suffered this fate - the

Henry Hitchings

#6. together they breakfasted on 'Venison and Chockalatte',

Henry Hitchings

#7. Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka ('a slit between the folding parts of a screen') and shchekotiki (which is 'half-tingle, half-tickle').6

Henry Hitchings

#8. gloomy, pensive, discontented temper This melancholy flatters, but unmans you; What is it else but penury of soul, A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind? - JOHN DRYDEN AT

Henry Hitchings