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Ungrateful daughters and betrayed fathers: an old topos in world literature. Just like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Balzac’s Old Goriot has to learn the hard way what it means when his daughters take away everything you own. Until you end up emptyhanded.

Jane Austen is sometimes devalued as “women’s literature”: sentimental, touchy-feely love stories, you know. In Victorian England, however, critics thought her not feminine enough. Why such categorizations are silly and Jane Austen’s novels sentimental only in the best way.

We know Andersen above all as the creator of the little mermaid. Yet he wrote a plethora of other fairytales for children, full of magic and grace. Why reading the Danish poet today is still worth it.

How do you survive a plague? Right, by fleeing the locus of the epidemic outbreak as fast as you can. Which is exactly what the rich and beautiful in Boccaccio’s Decameron do. And to pass the time, the take turns telling each other stories.

In the age of Wikipedia, with thousands of people contributing from all over the world, it is hard to imagine how someone could single-handedly compile 20-volume lexicons. Leus Swiss Lexicon is just that: a giant effort to write the biggest, most comprehensive lexicon of its time.