I love etiquette books. Test me on any part of Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette and Manners (1999 edition). Go on, I dare you. I know that baby back to front, inside and out.
Worrying, it seems from looking at the internet that there are swathes of people out there who simply have no idea at all how to eat a banana.
Writing historical fiction requires a fair bit of research. You might feel inspired writing about your ruff-wearing Victorian computer programmer and his love of hunting woolly mammoths but you are going to feel pretty silly once the reviews come in.
An Englishman in the 19th century wouldn’t have worn a belt. He didn’t even have a place to put a belt on his trousers. The fashion was to have smooth high-waisted trousers which created a tidy silhouette.
Some things sound like they SHOULD be porn but they're not. Like Catherine Cookson's The Whip and of course Free Willy.
Clearly I have been reading all the wrong kinds of Marquis de Sade books. The stuff of his I've read seems to be less about sexy spankings and more about women being repeatedly punched in the face and then set upon by dogs.
I have a love for the sort of spanking cartoons that used to appear in 'racy' humour magazines in the 1950s and 60s.
Discovering the world of Fan Fiction was a breakthrough. Finding out that there were whole swathes of people who would dedicate time to writing scenarios in which other people's fictional characters shagged - and occasionally spanked - one another was a revelation.