Free 5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback by Karl Shaw Page A

operation by an ear specialist. When Wilde is told how much the failed operation had cost, he replied,
    “Oh, well then, I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.” (According to an even wittier but apocryphal version, Wilde’s last words were “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”)
    6
    1915: Rupert Brooke, who wrote, “If I should die, think this only of me: ‘that there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’,” expires on a French hospital ship from blood poisoning, the result of an infected mosquito bite aggravated by sunstroke.
    92
    [Ten Notable Literary Deaths]
    7
    1931: Arnold Bennett is taken by typhoid, after cheerfully drinking a glass of tap water in a Paris hotel to demonstrate how completely safe it is.
    8
    1950: George Bernard Shaw falls out of the apple tree he was pruning at the age of ninety-four.
    9
    1963: Sylvia Plath, American poet, gasses herself in her kitchen oven at the age of thirty.
    10
    1983: Tennessee Williams chokes to death on a bottle cap that accidentally dropped into his mouth while he was using a nasal spray.
    93
    Ten
    10
    Thoughts on Shakespeare
    1
    VOLTAIRE “This enormous dunghill.”
    2
    LEO TOLSTOY “Crude, immoral, vulgar, and
    senseless.”
    3
    J. R. R. TOLKIEN “I went to King Edward’s School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English literature—except Shakespeare, which I disliked cordially . . .”
    4
    GEORGE BERNARD SHAW “With the single
    exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
    5
    WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, BRITISH POET
    “The sonnets are hot and pothery, there is much condensation, little delicacy, like raspberry jam without cream, without crust, without bread.”
    6
    DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.”
    7
    ROBERT GREENE, ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT
    “An upstart now beautified with our feathers.”
    8
    CHARLES DARWIN “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
    94
    [Ten Thoughts on Shakespeare]
    9
    SAMUEL PEPYS “. . . and then to the King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
    10
    KING GEORGE III “Is this not sad stuff, what what?”
    95
    10
    Ten Hollywood
    Suicide Shootings
    1
    BOBBY HARRON The twenty-seven-year-old silent-movie star shot himself while depressed after being overlooked for the lead in Way Down East in 1920.
    2
    KARL DANE The silent-movie star, overlooked when
    “talkies” arrived and no one could understand his heavy Danish accent, went home and shot himself in 1932.
    3
    HERMAN BING The comic actor, six years after providing the voice-over for the Ringmaster in Dumbo , despondent over his fading career, shot himself in 1948.
    4
    GEORGE REEVES In 1959, the original TV
    Superman, typecast and depressed over his inability to land another role, shot himself in the head in the upstairs bedroom of his Beverly Hills home while a party was in progress in the living room below. It was widely rumored that he believed he had acquired super powers and accidentally killed himself trying to fly.
    5
    PEDRO ARMENDÁRIZ In 1963, the actor shot
    himself two weeks after working on From Russia with Love .
    6
    GIG YOUNG Two years after receiving an Oscar for his supporting role in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? , he shot his wife and himself in a suicide pact three weeks after their wedding day in 1971.
    7
    FREDDIE PRINZE The comedian and star of Chico and the Man shot himself in front of his manager after a messy divorce in 1977. The verdict of suicide was later altered to reflect an