Reading English Books Together

Which is correct: The President Obama or President Obama? Lionel Messi, a first-class foorball player or  Lionel Messi, the first-class foorball player ? The writer Joanne Rowling or W riter Joanne Rowling?  Read our post to find it out.              Have you ever heard of George Bernard Shaw, THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHT? He wrote more than 50 plays including ‘Pygmalion’ and is the only man in history to be awarded both the Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Besides, he had a reputation for being a wit. Anecdotes abound featuring Shaw responding in an amusing and clever way to all sorts of situations he found himself in. Here are some of them: ANECDOTE 1 THE DANCER Isadora Duncan once wrote to George Bernard Shaw suggesting that they should have a child together: “Think of it!” she remarked. “With my body and your brains, what a wonder it would be.” “Yes,” Shaw replied. “But what if it had my body and your brains?” ISADORA DUNCAN ANECDOTE 2 Shaw decided to invite Winston Church

December is coming and we thought: Why not tell you a story that happened to the world renowned crime fiction writer one December evening?  Here it is: On the evening of the third of December in 1926 Agatha Christie left her house in Berkshire. Her car was later found abandoned but there was no sign of the famous novelist.  Her disappearance was shrouded in mystery and for 11 days the whole nation was gripped by the question: ‘What has happened to Agatha Christie?’  Agatha Christie in 1926 The police as well as volunteers had been searching high and low until a banjo player with the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate recognized Agatha Christie among the hotel guests and alerted the police. It came out that all this time Agatha Christie had been staying in the hotel under the assumed name of Theresa Neele. Till the end of her life Agatha Christie didn’t say a word about her flight from home on December evening leaving her biographers to wonder what had prompted her to get away and

‘It is better to hitch your wagon to a star than to wander aimlessly through life.’ The sentence contains one of the most popular English sayings which comes to mind whenever we think about being ambitious and aspiring to achieve more. ‘Hitch your wagon to a star’, we say to someone encouraging him to be brave and to set optimistic goals. But what is the origin of this saying? In 1870 Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American lecturer, poet and essayist, published his essay ‘Civilization’ in which he wrote that a civilized man will move on to accomplish more and more complex tasks and he will use the powers of nature to solve problems at hand: ‘Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing. Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-