A Boswell of Baghdad; With Diversions

"You nice absurd creatures," I said, "do be reasonable. To begin with, passing the doctor is an absolute necessity. That shuts you out. But even if you got through, how do you t...

"I have also been informed that the American publisher has dedicated this translation to an American. I have no objection to the book being dedicated to an American, but in doin...

The grammarian Moad Ibn Muslim Al-Harra left some good poetry, which he gave as having been uttered by genii, demons and female demons. The caliph Ar-Raschid once said to him: "...

In the Life of Ibn Abd Al-Barr, a Traditionist of Cordova, who, "it is stated, died in the year 380 (A.D. 990), but God knows best," a number of good stories are collected. This...

"They're all the rage now," he explained; "and we're out in the cold. If you throw your memory back a dozen years or so," he went on, "you will recall our popularity."

The poetry of love comprises, alas! also the poetry of despair. Here is an example by Ibn As-Sarraj, the grammarian: _I compared her beauty with her conduct, and found that her...

An old lady in Dublin who remembers Clifton singing this song tells me that the chorus, "So we'll trot along O," was so descriptive, both in words and music, that one had from i...

That beautiful phrase of the poet on his crucified hero--_I never saw a tree, before this, enabled to sustain all that was generous_--has an oddly close parallel, which I am tem...

The great face joke, as I say, obviously came first. Because there were in the early days none of the materials for the other staple quips--such as alcohol, and sausages, and wi...

The Vermilion Box Landmarks Listener's Lure Mr. Ingleside Over Bemerton's London Lavender Cloud and Silver Loiterer's Harvest One Day and Another Fireside and Sunshine Character...

"What did you do before the war?" He asks. The Poilu replies that he was a farmer in a very small way; he worked on the land, and he had some stock--two oxen, a horse, a cow, a...