Samuel Pepys kept his celebrated Diary from 1660 to 1669, although it was not published until 200 years later. The Diary’s significance stems from the happy coincidence that it covers a very important period in English history, including London’s Great Plague of 1665 and Great...
JM Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Scotland in 1860, but lived most of his adult life in England. Although he was a prolific and successful playwright, Barrie’s reputation nowadays is largely based on the popularity of Peter Pan (published as a play in 1904 and...
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, but lived in England for his entire adult life. Shaw wrote more than fifty plays including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) and Saint Joan (1923). He might...
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1865, but he lived in England for most of his adult life. Today he’s probably best remembered for the short story The Man Who Would be King (1888), the poem Gunga Din (1890) and the novel Kim...
Although Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, he was as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1874 to 1878 and then moved to London. So a literary tour of England should take in the controversial sculpture “A Conversation with Oscar Wilde” on...
Dr Samuel Johnson is most famous for A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), containing over 40,000 words, which took him nine years to compile. It brought Johnson great popularity and success, but he was also a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic and biographer. Dr...
In the mid-18th Century Thomas Gray was famous. His masterpiece – still popular and widely admired – is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) for which he found inspiration in the graveyard of St Giles’ Church in Stoke Poges (20 miles west of London)....
Ian Fleming wrote twelve full-length James Bond novels, all of which were turned into memorable movies, and two collections of short stories. The books (published between 1952 and 1966) have sold over 100 million copies to date, making Bond one of the best-selling fictional characters...
One of England’s most popular 20th Century writers, Daphne Du Maurier is best remembered for her novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), Frenchman’s Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951) and The Scapegoat (1957) and her short stories The Birds (1963) and Don’t Look Now (1971)....
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre – in the village of Great Missenden, 30 miles northwest of London – is both enchanting and instructive: a special place to include in your next literary tour of England). Dahl (who was Welsh by birth) lived in...