A great wine connoisseur invited Brahms to dinner and in his honor brought out some of his choicest bottles. "This is the Brahms of my cellar," he announced to the company as wine from a venerable bottle was poured into the composer's glass. Brahms scrutinized the wine closely, inhaled its bouquet, took a sip, and then put down his glass without comment.

"How do you like it?" anxiously asked the host.

"Better bring out your Beethoven," murmured Brahms.

A newspaper to which Rudyard Kipling subscribed published by mistake an announcement of his death. Kipling wrote at once to the editor: "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

Censuring Stalin at a public meeting, Krushchev was interrupted by a voice from the audience. "You were one of Stalin's colleagues," shouted the heckler. "Why didn't you stop him?"

"Who said that?" roared Khrushchev. There was an agonizing silence in the room. Nobody dared to move a muscle. Then, in a quiet voice, Khrushchev said, "Now you know why."

While visiting Hollywood one year, Margot Asquith (the second wife of British Liberal prime minister Henry Asquith) had occasion to meet the famous platinum-blonde film star Jean Harlow.

Not only did Harlow make the mistake of addressing Lady Asquith by her Christian name (Margot), she also pronounced it to rhyme with "pot." Asquith was not amused. "My dear, the 't' is silent," she snidely remarked, "as in Harlow."

Silvan Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses...
"During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours, staring at the horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor.

"He had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on their emotional relationship," psychologist Paul Ekman once explained.

"If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something like that — no one really knew for certain.)"