The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Unsurpassed as a work of literary and comic genius, Jerome K Jerome's "Idle Thoughts" is a wonderful set of essays detailing the author's view on a variety of topics, from babies and being hard up to cats and dogs, furnished apartments and being in love, as this extract shows: "Questions of taste were soon decided in those days.

When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful to live.

He said he would step outside and see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head - the other man's head, I mean - then that proved that his - the first fellow's - girl was a pretty girl." "But if the other fellow broke his head - not his own, you know, but the other fellow's - the other fellow to the second fellow, that is, because of course the other fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not the first fellow who - well, if he broke his head, then his girl - not the other fellow's, but the fellow who was the - look here, if A broke B's head, then A's girl was a pretty girl; but if B broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, but B's girl was.That was their method of conducting art criticism.

Nowadays we light a pipe and let the girls fight it out among themselves."