Edward Lear (1812-88) was a painter and musician of great repute. These days he’s remembered more as an author, especially for his nonsense collections of poems and songs. A Book of Nonsense (1846) is a collection of limericks, the format of which he was probably...
Charles Kingsley (1819-75) was an Anglican priest. In 1844 he was appointed Rector of Eversley in Hampshire. In 1859 he became chaplain to Queen Victoria and in 1861 private tutor to her eldest son, the future Edward VII. He was a canon of Chester Cathedral...
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is one of England’s greatest poets. He made his reputation in his early 20’s, especially with the publication of An Essay on Criticism (1711). The poem includes lines that are still familiar: for example “To err is human; to forgive, divine”, “A...
Ted Hughes (1930-98) was one of Britain’s greatest post-war writers and Poet Laureate from 1964 until his death. One of his most successful books, The Iron Man (1968) was the inspiration for The Who's 1989 rock opera of the same name and for the Warner Brothers animated film...
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) was, in his time, second only to Dickens in popularity. These days, however, his reputation rests almost entirely on the enduring popularity of his satirical novel Vanity Fair (1848). There were movie adaptations in 1932 with Myrna Loy, 1935 (titled Becky...
Dorothy L Sayers was a writer of detective fiction, best remembered for the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Five of the eleven Wimsey novels – including the best known, The Nine Tailors (1934) – were adapted for television by the BBC (1972-75) starring the incomparable...
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was one of the greatest Victorian poets, arguably on a par with Tennyson and Browning. Dover Beach (1867), probably written in 1851, the year of his marriage, is a particular favorite. The poem is a melancholy, even pessimistic, reflection on modern life....
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born in Edinburgh in 1859, graduated with a medical degree from the city’s University. He set up practice in Portsmouth in 1882 and it was there that he wrote A Study in Scarlet (1887), the novel that introduced the world to...
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the greatest of the Romantic poets. Like his friends Byron and Keats, he produced a remarkable body of work in a very short life. He is remembered for classic poems such as Ozymandias (1818), Ode to the West...
Gilbert White – naturalist and ornithologist – is most famous for his ground-breaking work The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). The book is as popular as ever, having been republished more than 300 times. It was a favorite of Charles Darwin and Virginia...