Penhurst Place in the western part of Kent is one of the country’s great and most complete Medieval buildings. Even in the words of as harsh a judge as John Newman in the Pevsner `Buildings of England’ series, the place wins this accolade: `There is no finer or more complete Read more…
The British poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) spent most of his adult life in California, where be moved in 1954 to be close to his partner Mike Kitay. It is this more adventurous environment in which he produced his work after his first book of poetry came out in 1953. However, Read more…
In the 1930s, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was reportedly the world’s highest paid writer, feted in Hollywood, Europe and able to sell vast quantities of his work in the UK. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was the embassy lawyer, his mother tragically died of tuberculosis Read more…
Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) preferred to be known simply under her initial E, due to her feeling that this at least gave the impression of her being a man, and therefore not being judged simply on the grounds of her gender. A political activist throughout her adult life, and a founding Read more…
At some point, like people in the past making towards Italy from northern Europe by land, you have to face the enormous challenge of crossing the Alps. The same applies metaphorically to anyone who wants to write or study the literature of Kent. At some point, one has to deal Read more…
The Sir Thomas Wyatt pub by London Road in Allington near Maidstone (a place, incidentally, that figured in Ian Fleming’s `Moonraker’) is one of the more visible monuments to a literary life at least started in Kent, even if the main events of that life did not happen here. This Read more…
Kent’s role as the setting for children’s literature or the home of major authors in this genre is unparalleled. E Nesbit, Mary Tourtel, Clive King all lived in the country or set parts of some of their best known books here. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) is one of the best Read more…
Tunbridge Wells’ more recent reputation as a place of placidity and letter-writing colonels satirised in magazines like `Private Eye’ for their fury at the ill directions the world has taken sits uncomfortably with the accounts of it from its hey-day as a spa town, a place where people could go Read more…
Along the seafront at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, behind a concrete wall, stands Marine Parade, a long terrace of Victoria era houses. One of them, that at number 26, has a small plaque on the front, commemorating the fact that the German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) lived there Read more…
The Second World War did not produce the kind of recognition for a specific group of poets associated with it than did the First. Alun Lewis (1915-1944) is perhaps the best known, and was an excellent poet, but he has none of the recognition today granted to figures like Wilfred Read more…