Newest Questions
7,577 questions
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Meaning of "he keeps his knickers in the fridge"
Spoiler alert: this question reveals some major plot points.
In The Killings at Badger's Drift, an unnamed old lady describes the character Dennis Rainbird thusly:
"And a slimy little wart he is ...
- 35k
8
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1
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Why does Arrian always specify who was archon of Athens when giving a date?
In the Anabasis written by Arrian, when there is a mention of time, the author always mentions the archon of Athens. For example, from the English translation by E. J. Chinnock (1884):
It is said ...
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0
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Kid's book series where each character had their own book - the one I had was purple and centered around a little Asian girl
It was a series of books centering around a group of friends. Each character had their own book. I don't remember much about it but I know the one I had was purple and centered around a little Asian ...
6
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1
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"There is no rock so senseless" in Petrarch's sonnet 162
I don't understand the last two lines in this sonnet from Petrarch, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1903) (emphasis added):
O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!
’Mid which my pensive ...
- 163
1
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0
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Short story where a man is hanged in his jail cell using a child's toy
I have a vague feeling this might have been in a paperback Alfred Hitchcock anthology, but I can't pin down which one (I read several as a child). I probably read it in the late 1980s to early 1990s. ...
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2
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1
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What's the significance of Captain Haddock having hollow eyes with a color similar to his skin?
In the Adventures of Tintin by Herge, Captain Haddock has different eyes compared to other characters: Others have circular or oval eyes with a completely black color. But Haddock has the same shape ...
- 953
7
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1
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What figure is "Each day seems long, and longs for long-stay'd night" in Sidney's sonnet 89?
My question is about the line "Each day seems long, and longs for long-stay'd night" in Sir Philip Sidney's 89th sonnet from Astrophil and Stella. In reality, it is the poet who is the ...
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1
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Why has Hergé twice called Dupont and Dupond brothers in the original French-language text of Tintin?
Dupont and Dupond are two clumsy detectives in the Tintin comics who are exactly identical in appearance except for a tiny difference in their moustaches.
They aren't related by blood and their ...
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1
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0
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77
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What's the first work of literature with a plot similar to A Christmas Carol but in a different holiday or country?
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is about a greedy money-loving, selfish man who, on Christmas Day, dreams about three ghosts of a past, present and future Christmas, due to which he decides to ...
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5
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What does "ol’ Dragon Eyes" mean in "Offerings" by Michael ByungJu Kim?
What does the phrase "ol' Dragon eyes" mean in Offerings (2020) by Michael ByungJu Kim? My initial guess was that it might be the name of a restaurant, but I'm not sure.
We meet after work ...
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Who wrote "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"?
The famous piece of flash fiction "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Wikipedia notes, however, that "versions of the story first appeared in ...
- 35k
3
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1
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Where can I find the full text of the interview of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with Oriana Fallaci?
Several years ago I read an interview in a newspaper of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with Oriana Fallaci.
Where can I find the full text of this interview?
I thought it was included in the book called ...
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Does the text of Macbeth support the idea that the plot is cyclical?
For what it's worth, the question contains "spoilers" as to the plot of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
At the weekend, I went to see a production of Macbeth that had taken some fairly major ...
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2
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Isekai manga identification about a boy that got send to a dangerous dungeon, befriends a talking cat and goes on crazy adventures
I read a manga that a forgot the name of some time ago about a boy getting teleported with a girl to another world, but he gets separated from her and is in a very dangerous dungeon. Where he meets a ...
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Short story about a woman who lives alone with a dog that is killed by a man stalking her
I read this in high school in the mid 80s. A woman lives on the edge of town in a mobile I think, with her dog. This guy is stalking her, hanging outside her house at night and the dog keeps barking ...
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