There are often curious, sometimes unbelievable stories behind our terms, idioms and proverbs. Here you learn how the bloody events of the American Civil War gave us the dreaded deadlines, why we speak of butterflies in the stomach when we mean love, and why one should absolutely avoid bringing something to the trapeze.

The book includes adapted texts about Nikolay Pirogov, an outstanding Russian surgeon. Pirogov (1810-1881) was a prominent Russian scientist, doctor, pedagogue, public figure, and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1847). He is considered to be the founder of field surgery, and was one of the first surgeons in Europe to use ether as an anaesthetic. He was the first surgeon...

A chronological selection in which the most important representatives of German literature, who cultivated aphorism as an art form in their own right, have their say with their masterly creations: from Lichtenberg and Goethe to Nietzsche and Karl Kraus to Handke, Botho Strauss and Martin Walser. The publisher Friedemann Spicker has been researching aphorisms for years.

A story of a young man from France, who came to Russia to work and to travel. Illustrated with multiple colorful images of various Russian sites.

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the vocabulary and phraseology of Russian publicistic writing. The dictionary is compiled based on the works of leading essayists and contemporary journalists, drawing upon newspaper materials and linguistic literature. Each dictionary entry includes a definition of the word, its grammatical and stylistic characteristics, its lexical and...