I once stayed in a hotel in Vienna, one of those self-­consciously designed establishments with backlit photos embedded in the walls and tubes of blue, red, and yellow light placed strategically around every common space. My room had a soft blue light in it, a queasy kind of light that made me je...

Here’s a round up of some of the interviews, talks, and articles that have appeared on The World in a Phrase over the past few weeks…

On the ePODstemology podcast, host Mark Fabian and I discussed how I go about conducting research on aphorisms and my year in the British Library compiling Geary’s...

I took a spin through some back issues of Reader’s Digest, where I first discovered aphorisms, and was delighted (and surprised) by what I found. I sampled a few issues from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I was reminded of the Points to Ponder recurring feature, a version of the Quotable Quo...

It was the title — Are You a Bromide? — that caught my attention. Potassium bromide is used in medicine as a sedative; literary bromides, anti-aphorisms, have the same effect. In this slim book, published in the early 1900s, author and humorist Gelett Burgess defines two types of people: the Brom...