Asplenium listeri Asplenium listeri Asplenium listeri, commonly known as the Christmas Island spleenwort, is a species of fern in the Aspleniaceae family. It is endemic to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the north-eastern Indian Ocean. Its specific epithet honours British zoologist and plant collector Joseph Jackson Lister, who visited the island on in 1887 and was the first to collect a specimen. The spleenwort is a small, terrestrial, lithophytic fern with shortly creeping rhizomes, and with fronds up to 90 mm long held in a crown. Found only on Christmas Island, the fern is known from a very small number of
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage