The Shakespeare scholar Samuel Schoenbaum in his magisterial overview of the vast amount of theories and claims about the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), `Shakespeare’s Lives’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991) referred to a story about the task of trying to understand the personality and life of the playwright through his Read more…
Those approaching Ashford from the west by car, going along the A20, once the main route from London before the M20 was completed in the 1990s, will come to a large roundabout. Straight ahead, the direction goes into the town itself. But the second exit runs along beside an international Read more…
Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was born in south east London, at a time when it was relatively easy to get from Brockley, his home, into the Kent countryside, which was close by. Today, it is for his 1927 work, `Tarka the Otter’ that he is best remembered. However, his first substantial Read more…
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was older than his fellow poet Edmund Blunden. But they shared two things – one, the searing experience of being involved in combat in the First World War, and the impact that had on their lives and their work; the other was that they were born and Read more…
If Kent lacks any proper memorial for the clear links that Ian Fleming and his creation 007 has in the county, the relative silence on Jane Austen and the part of her life she spent here is even stranger. There were significant enough to fill a whole book – `Jane Read more…
The novelist and short story writer Herbert Earnest Bates (1905-1974), while a native of Northamptonshire, lived for over forty years from 1931 to his death in the village of Little Chart Forstal, near Ashford. His description of looking around properties with his wife, Marjorie (nicknamed Madge) in the early 1930s Read more…
The work of the writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908-1966) was unjustly neglected in his life, and while many of these are now back in print again, he has never enjoyed the kind of acclaim that his output deserves. He was a prolific writer, across a range of different genres, and over Read more…
The beginning is secluded, intimate, but portentous, almost ominously so: `The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of the interminable waterway, In the office the sea and sky were welded together without any joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges Read more…
Ian Fleming, creator of the 007 figure famous worldwide through the very successful film series based (mostly) on his books, lived and wrote for part of his life in Kent. He was inspired to write another of his creations, about the Chitty-chitty Bang-bang car, by a resident of an estate Read more…