Quotes from Caroline Taggart

What mostly happens in the Iliad is that Achilles has a hissy fit because Agamemnon has stolen a slave girl of his, sulks in his tent for eight books and spends the ninth telling Agamemnon he's had enough and he's going home.

As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.' CALVIN TRILLIN

Accents must have been pretty important in Ancient Greek, because a man called Herodian wrote a treatise in twenty-one books about them, most of which, you'll be happy to know, are now lost.

alea iacta est: 'the die is cast'.

Webster's dislike of words that weren't pronounced the way they looked led him to decree that words such as centre and theatre should be spelled center and theater; he also dropped the silent u from words such as colour, favour and honour. In fact, Webster was single-handedly responsible for most of the differences between British and American spelling that survive to this day.

1453: FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE You might not think it was a big deal (after all, cities were falling all over the place all of the time)

William McKinley (R, 1897-1901): president during the Spanish-American War that saw the United States acquire Cuba and the Philippines.

A group of Puritans, persecuted in England because of their religion

He was murdered in Hawaii.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once said: "Living next to the Americans is like sleeping next to an elephant—no matter how friendly and even-tempered the elephant, one is affected by every twitch!

The other story about Midas is that he was called upon to judge between the music of Pan and Apollo and found in favour of Pan. Apollo, understandably annoyed (he was, after all, god of music, whereas Pan was merely god of shepherds and tootled on the odd pipe in his spare time), punished Midas by making a pair of ass's ears sprout from his head.

The Paleozoic was followed by the Permian extinction, when 95 percent of all life on Earth—plants and animals on both land and sea—died. Just like that. Just when they were beginning to get the hang of it. (To be fair, the period of extinction lasted millions of years, so "just like that" is an exaggeration, but scientists still don't know for sure why it happened.)