William Blake – born in 1757 in London – was an inspiration for songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Van Morrison. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1970 album, Songs of Innocence and Experience, featured musical settings of poems from Blake’s collection of the same name....
In 1834 Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane moved into 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, a Georgian terraced house in London’s elegant Chelsea district, where Carlyle lived until his death in 1881. It was there that he wrote his masterwork The French Revolution: A History...
EM Forster – born in London in 1879 – was a well-regarded novelist and short story writer. He was nominated 16 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but never won. Five of his six novels, which examine class differences and hypocrisy, were successfully adapted...
Laurence Sterne was born in Ireland in 1713. After graduating from Jesus College, Cambridge in 1737 he was ordained as a priest. He then moved to north Yorkshire and made it his home for most of the rest of his life. His masterwork – The...
Robert Browning is one of the greatest of all Victorian poets. He was born in London in 1812 and began writing poetry at an early age. He’s best remembered for Porphyria’s Lover (1842), My Last Duchess (1842), How They Brought the Good News from Ghent...
Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born in 1343 or 1344 in London. Today he’s remembered as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and the “Father of English Literature”. In 1387 he started writing The Canterbury Tales, in which a disparate group of people tell stories...
Noel Coward demonstrated his razor-sharp wit in more than fifty plays, plus songs, essays and three volumes of autobiography. Many of his plays are still in the popular repertoire, including Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933) and Blithe Spirit (1941). Private...
John Ruskin was born in London in 1819. His home from 1871 until his death in 1900 was Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District. This lovely house is filled with paintings, furniture and Ruskin’s personal treasures. In the nearby village of Coniston there’s...
In 1953 Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Churchill the writer is remembered today for three epic histories: Marlborough: His Life and...
AE Housman (1859-1936) will always be remembered for A Shropshire Lad (1896): his collection of 63 poems that evoke timeless themes such as rustic serenity, unrequited love, fleeting youth, death and grief. Its revered place in the history of English poetry has been boosted by...