Colin Marshall

The Middle East is hardly the world's most harmonious region, and it only gets more fractious if you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. But there's one thing on which many residents of that wide geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī.

In June of 2014, Harvard University's Houghton Library put up a blog post titled 'Caveat Lecter,' announcing 'good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs, and cannibals alike.' The occasion was the scientific determination that a book in the Houghton's collection long rumored to have been bound in human skin — the task of whose retrieval once served, they say, as a hazing ritual for student employees — was, indeed, 'without a doubt bound in human skin.' What a difference a decade makes: not only has the blog post been deleted, the book itself has been taken out of from circulation in order to have the now-offending binding removed.

In 2006, David Foster Wallace published a piece in the New York Times Magazine headlined 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience.' Even then, he could declare Federer, 'at 25, the best tennis player currently alive.

When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground.

The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Few depictions of ancient Roman life neglect to reference all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impression that their civilization was obsessed with cleanliness, in contrast to most of the societies found around the world at the time, but that turns out hardly to be the case.

It doesn't take an expert in the field to know that, around the world, there is much disagreement on the subject of religion.

If you've studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux.

Cellists unwilling to settle for any but the finest instrument must, sooner or later, make a pilgrimage to Cremona — or rather, to the Cremonas. One is, of course, the city in Lombardy that was home to numerous pioneering master luthiers, up to and including Antonio Stradivari.

Even if a student assigned Beowulf is, at first, dismayed by its language, that same student may well be captivated by its setting.