About this site

What is a Florilegium?

The Latin word florilegium literally means a gathering of flowers. Adapted from a Greek word with the same meaning (anthologia = 'anthology'), the florilegium developed into a common medieval genre: a gathering of literary blooms from other writings or from a larger work.

Florilegiums are always very personal collections reflecting the interests, focus and preoccupations of the collector. Individual items are known as 'pithies'.

Viewing this website (the techie-nerdy bit!)

BUG ALERT! Please view this site using a desktop computer or laptop. It should work in any browser. Pages will not display correctly on a tablet or mobile owing to a Google bug.

This website has been written using Google Sites which enables you to create simple, rather limited,  websites, but it is FREE! and fairly straightforward to use—which is it's main virtue. It also contains a very helpful function whereby you can embed word-processed documents, created in GDOCS, right inside web pages. This makes updating and publishing text-heavy material very easy and efficient. In theory the system should then adapt the page you are viewing to the device on which you are reading it. In other words it should reformat a page when viewed on a tablet or mobile, rendering it smaller but still readable. BUT—I've discovered the reformatting does not work on tablets or mobiles so I'm afraid you have to view the material posted here on a laptop or desktop computer. If you try to look at an embedded doc on a handheld device it only shows you the first page and you can't scroll down the rest of the doc. This is clearly a bug as it is is possible to read the same doc though GDRIVE. I have reported this bug to Google but as GSITES is  free product and it works well in other respects it's difficult to complain too loudly! I might at a later date insert links to PDF versions of the docs but for the time being  I suggest sticking to using a desktop or laptop to view the site.

Copyleft

All the 'pithies' on this site are in the public domain so you can copy them to your heart's content under COPYLEFT conventions.

Some of the articles I have included on this site are currently published on the web and have simply been edited and reformatted here for ease of reading. If the title is blue then if you click on it you will be taken to the original version on the web. All re-copied material is attributed to the original publisher.

Attributions

I've included the attribution of each pithy where I have been able to ascertain it, however, you should always read any attribution with a pinch of salt. Nigel Rees has pointed-out that quotes are subject to a principle he calls Churchillian Drift—that is—a quote by a less-known person tends over time to get attributed to a more famous and prestigious person—a kind of upward reputational drift. So Churchill, Albert Einstein and Mark Twain are credited with far more bon mots than they could ever have uttered in their own lifetimes.