Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Reader Peeleman's letter about how Napoleon judged a woman who accused one of his officers of raping her [Aug. 12] reminded me of a similar story about a praetor in Caesar's army who also had a woman complain to him that she had been raped. The praetor handed the woman his sword and asked her to sheathe it while he moved the scabbard. The woman took his sword and lopped off his hand, causing the scabbard to fall to the floor. After that she had no problem sheathing the sword...
Such advice to the sexlorn might arouse little more than a smirk from U.S. and Western European readers accustomed to more sophisticated counsel. The Russians, however, are virtually panting for the suggestions, which appear in an astonishingly frank sex survey sponsored by the puritanical Soviet government. Female Sexual Pathology, a 189-page paperback illustrated with a handful of blurry photographs of lesbians and transvestites, sold out in its first few days in Soviet bookstores and is currently the hottest-selling item on the Moscow black market, where curious Communists are shelling out more than 50 times the book...
...course, the reader cannot escape without some stern Soviet moralizing. Premarital sex, warns the author, "can be a source of severe psychic disturbances and can lead to social impoverishment of the personality." For marital sex, his prescription is not more than once per night nor should it "last too long." If intercourse occurs in the morning, the couple should take a long snooze before getting out of bed. That way they will emerge at full strength for a day of socialist labor...
Well, then, a reader concludes, did the French win the French and Indian War? Not really, says Historian Thomas. A third force, not taken into account by either side, entered the picture. This was the royal house of Stuart, in the glittering person and presence of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender and son of the exiled Stuart King James III. The handsome, 39-year-old prince was beaten at Culloden in 1746, when the infamous Duke of Cumberland broke the power of the Scottish clans. He fled to France with the price of ? 30,000 on his head...
...stalks opium dens; every flower girl has a "lily-white bosom" and is generally no older than 14-Burke seemed to have a pre-Nabokov feeling for nymphets. There are sharp krisses, malevolent white parrots and deadly snakes. It is, in fact, a never-never land that encloses the reader in a cave of such hypnotic mandarin prose as the following...