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)....
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City. As a young man he traveled extensively in Europe, eventually settling in London in 1869 and becoming a British subject in 1915 (less than a year before his death at the age of 72). Lamb...
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...
T E Lawrence is best known for his exploits in Arabia during the First World War, which he vividly describes in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). In the opinion of Winston Churchill: "It ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language....
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)....
It’s seventy years since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell’s ominously prophetic masterwork. As an allegory for our present stressful times, it’s amazingly insightful. Some of the book’s most frightening notions are even with us in reality: Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, for example, foreshadows the...
“Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.” – Lord Byron The Ultimate Romantic Byron was the world’s first pop star. He was also “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, according to Lady Caroline Lamb. She should know since she was one of Byron’s most ardent lovers. Their...
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...
There’s almost complete agreement that the greatest novel by an English writer is Middlemarch (1871-72), George Eliot’s sprawling account of life in a provincial town in the middle of the 19th Century. So why is she so poorly commemorated? After all, she wrote many other...
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) holds a special place in the hearts (and minds) of many people, adults and children alike. It’s fantasy, of course, but it’s also deeply satirical, totally illogical and lots of fun. Try this brief extract: “But I don’t...