There are very, very few words in the English language where vowels aren’t used. And ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language. There are 22 ‘e’s in the previous two sentences alone! Then, imagine how much difficult it must have been to write Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel without the letter ‘e’! Except…
Cartoonist Stan Lee’s creation Hulk made his maiden appearance in the year 1962, in a comic series named after him – The Incredible Hulk. The Hulk is the alter ego of a timid and aloof physicist named Bruce Banner. His accidental exposure to gamma rays lead to mutation in him. He physically transforms into a…
‘Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.’ – Agatha Christie, An Autobiography Agatha Christie is a name that never misses when it comes to detective novels. Most of us have grown up reading her mysteries. Regarded…
The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious awards at the international level. The award honours academic, cultural and/or scientific advances. Literature was one of the five categories established according to the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish polymath, in 1895. The other four categories were physics, chemistry, peace and medicine. The first in the world to receive the…
The rhino looks like it is wearing a coat of armour. Rudyard Kipling, in his story ‘How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin’, tells an interesting tale about how a Parsee called Pestonjee Bomonjee baked a magical cake and a rhinoceros ate it on an uninhabited Island on the Red Sea. When that happened, the rhinoceros…
The poem ‘Vision of Sin’ (1842) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson has the following lines: Every moment dies a man Every moment one is born Charles Babbage, the famous mathematician and designer of the first programmable computer, argued that these lines indicate that the world population remains fixed, which is contrary to the reality and advised…
