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Mark on their wedding night. Tristram and Iseult fall hopelessly in love, although Iseult is contracted to marry Mark. In one version of the story, Tristram marries another woman but, when dying, sends for Iseult. He arranges a signal from the boat in which she would be travelling to let him know whether she is on board. If she is, a white flag will be flown; a black flag will be flown if she is not. When the boat arrives, the white flag is flying, but his wife tells him it is black and he dies in despair, believing that Iseult has not come. The relationship is the subject of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, which ends after Tristan has died in Isolde's arms.

Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, w. SOMERSET MAUGHAM The Razor's Edge, 1944

TroilllS and Cressida Troilus and Cressida are characters from Greek mythology, mentioned in Homer's Iliad although not as lovers. The main postclassical sources for their story, which is set against the background of the Trojan war, are Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c.1385) and Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida (1609). Troilus, a son of the Trojan king Priam, falls in love with Cressida, and she is persuaded to start a love affair with him by Pandarus, her uncle. Cressida is then required to move to the Greek camp, either because her father has defected to the Greeks or as part of the war negotiations. Once in the Greek camp she betrays Troilus by falling in love with the Greek commander, Diomedes.

In such a night

Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls

And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,

Where Cressid lay that night.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The Merchant of Venice, 1600

'Troilus loved and was fooled,' said the more manly chaplain. A man may love and yet not be a Troilus. All women are not Cressids!

ANTHONY TROLLOPE Barchester Towers, 1857

Lying

The stories of ANANIAS, MATILDA, and PINOCCHIO each link lying with punishment, BILLY LIAR and WALTER MiTTY, British and American respectively, are both fantasists, BARON MUNCHAUSEN, the teller of tall tales, is, as the quotations illustrate, an apt name to invoke when it is difficult to believe what someone is saying. • See also Honesty and Truth, Hypocrisy

Ananias In the New Testament, Ananias was the husband of Sapphira, who lied in order to keep some money for himself. On being found out and accused of lying to God as well as to men he 'fell down, and gave up the ghost' (Acts 5 : 5).

Suddenly, catching the surgeon's arm convulsively, he exclaimed, pointing down to

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the body, 'It is the divine judgement on Ananias! Look!' HERMAN MELVILLE Billy Budd, 1924

Billy Liar Keith Waterhouse's 1959 novel Billy Liar tells the story of Billy Fisher, a compulsive day-dreamer who dreams of a better and more glamorous life. A Billy Liar is therefore a day-dreamer who lives in a fantasy world.

Joseph Coebbels Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) became Hitler's minister of propaganda in 1933. He had control of the press and radio, and used these in order to control the flow of information to the German public and thus further the Nazi cause. He is sometimes mentioned as an archetypal propagandist.

Bhutto has rejected all these charges as politically motivated, saying that they were 'hatched up by the Goebbels of the Pakistani government!

The Observer, 1997

I mean, let's face it, the propaganda that the car industry puts out would give Coebbels and Stalin a run for their money in terms of pure Utopian disinformation.

BEN ELTON Inconceivable, 1999

Matilda Hillaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales (1939) contains the story of Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death. Matilda, a young girl who 'told such Dreadful Lies', had called out the fire brigade as a joke, only to find herself a few weeks later at home when a real fire broke out. Despite her screams for help, no one would believe that there really was a fire:

'For every time She shouted 'Fire!' They only answered 'Little Liar!' '

Matilda and the house were both burned.

Walter Mitty James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

(1939) relates how a henpecked husband escapes his wife's nagging by retreating into his own world of daydreams in which he is the hero of many adventures. A Walter Mitty is someone who lives in a fantasy world, especially someone who has lost touch with reality.

A chauffeur described as a Walter Mitty character was jailed for a year yesterday for dishonestly trying to claim a share of the National Lottery's first jackpot of nearly 6m. Knightsbridge Crown Court in central London was told that James Madel had walked into the organiser Camelot's London offices on 21 November last year, amid a blaze of publicity, and handed officials a ticket he claimed had been ripped up by his dog but which nevertheless entitled him to £839,254.

The Independent, 1995

Baron Munchausen Baron Munchausen (sometimes spelled Munchhausen)

is the hero of a book by Rudolf Erich Raspe entitled Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785). The book recounts stories of the Baron's travels and adventures, which always emphasize the intelligence and prowess of the hero, and are far-fetched in the extreme. The original Baron Munchausen, believed to have lived 1720-97, is said to have served in the Russian army against the Turks and related wildly extravagant tales of his adventures.

And when in after days I lost my awe of Mr. Peter enough to question him myself, he laughed at my curiosity, and told me stories that sounded so very much like Baron

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Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was a US novelist, short story writer, and journalist, whose works include For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He had a reputation for machismo and for celebrating such tough masculine pursuits as big-game hunting, bullfighting, and deep-sea fishing.

Cameron is what used to be quaintly called a man's man. For pleasure, he likes to race cars and shoot guns in the desert. But nothing, he'll tell you, is as 'hard, as physically demanding' as making films. Play sceptical and suggest, for mischief, that messing with images is hardly a proper manly pursuit and he'll turn into Hemingway with a lens.

The Observer, 1998

Rambo Rambo is the hero of David MorrelPs novel First Blood (1972), a Vietnam War veteran characterized as macho and bent on violent retribution, and popularized in three films in which the character is played by Sylvester Stallone. The name can be applied to any man who displays a great deal of physical violence or aggression.

Times like that a mini fire-extinguisher isn't near as comforting as a sub-machine- gun, but it was the best I could do. I got ready to ram the button and kneed open the door—that's about the only advantage lever handles have, you don't need hands to use them. I felt a little silly crouching there like Rambo when there was no one in the place but me.

SARAH LACEY File under: Jeopardy, 1995

Dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear—the kind that so many fathers and sons wear on hunting expeditions in the surrounding countryside at weekends—they were firing Rambo-style with an array of weapons, including high-velocity rifles and handguns.

The Independent, 1998

Tarzan Tarzan is a character in novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and subsequent films and TV series. He is an English aristocrat, Lord Greystoke, who is abandoned as a small child in the African jungle and reared by apes. Tarzan is a very strong and fearless hero, often depicted as wrestling with wild animals or using liana vines to swing through the trees of the jungle.

"The other side now, viejo," he shouted up to Anselmo and climbed across through the trestling, like a bloody Tarzan in a rolled steel forest.

ERNEST HEMINCWAY For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1941

I thought I recognized one of his buddies looking fetching in greasy styled hair and a stained T-shirt under a sports shirt he'd unbuttoned, son of an urban-Tarzan-gone- to-seed look.

KAREN KIJEWSKI Wild Kot, 1994

Terminator In the film The Terminator (1984) and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an almost indestructible android sent from the future. Bothfilmsare extremely violent, and the Terminator destructively deploys an arsenal of massive weaponry.

And I'd have to invest in martial arts coaching and learn some police techniques for subduing felons. I didn't want to turn myself into the Terminator, but I didn't want to continue to operate at my present Elmer Fudd level, either.

JANET EVANOVICH One for the Money, 1994

John Wayne John Wayne (1907-79) was a US film actor, nicknamed 'the