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Irving Cobb was one of the most famous American newspaper reporters. In 1914 his reports from the battlefronts in Frannce and Belgium alerted the worldto German atrocities. During the First World War Ivong Cobb was in Belgium covering the German invasion...

The American painter James Whistler was cornered at a party by a very snobbish Bostonian lady who asked him where he had been born.Whistler told her that he came from Lowell, Massachusetts. The lady winced. ´What ever possessed you to be born in a place...

The actress Mae West was seen wearing the most extravagant pearls. One of her female compations exclaimed, ´Goodness, Mae, where did you got those beautyful pearls?` ´You can take it froom me,sister,` replied Mae, ´that goodness had nothing to do with...

Brithish author Somerset Maugham always travelled in french ships. When asked why he replied, ´Because there`s none of that nonsense about women and children first.`

The German writer Lessing could be very forgetful. Once he returned home after dark without his key. He knocked on the front door and a servant peered out of an upstairs window, not recognizing him in the dark. ´Professor Lessing is not at home,` called...

When the Earl of Denbigh asked the famous novelist, Henry Fielding, a relation of his, why his family spelt their name ´ie` whilst the earl`s family spelt theirs ´ei`, he was told, ´I cannot be certain, my lord, except that perhaps my branch of the family...

At a certain social event the British actor Samuel Foote was irritated by the sound of a man nearby singing. ´Why are you singing that one tune all the time?`Foote asked ´Because it haunts me1`the man replied ´I`m not surprised,` retorted Foote, ´since...

By 1798, pre-eminence in air warfare rested with the French, who by then had two ´balloon companies` attached to the Republican Army. But one man put an end to military ballooning and that was Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The problem was that the gallant...

At public executions in the eighteenth century the mobs that gatherd to watch, and sometimes even the hangman himself, were thoroughly drunk. In1738, at one execution the hangman, already intoxicated, was convinced that he was supposed to be hanging three...

The French were resitant to the potato. The frequent dearhs of wheat during the eighteenth century resulted in bundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation. In spite of this, zhe major of Frenchmen could not be convinced that the potato was not poisonous....