The American novelist, activist and journalist Jack London (1876-1916) is widely known today for his stories drawn from his experience of the Klondike Gold Rush – `The Call of the Wild’ (1903) and `White Fang’ (1906) being amongst the most popular. They are characterised by an almost breathless style, recounting Read more…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is the English Romantic figure par excellence. Despite living almost two centuries ago, his poetry, his letters, copious notebooks and treatises on literature and philosophy, despite their often idiosyncratic spelling and grammar, have a very contemporary feel. He brought his most intimate life into all of Read more…
John Gower (c1330-1408) was an almost exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, and, like both of them, associated with the popularisation and acceptance of literature in English rather than Latin. Of his most important surviving work, however, each is written in a different language: `Mirour de l’Omme’ is Read more…
The life of the antiquarian, William Somner (1598-1669) spanned the end of the Tudor period and the establishment, and then re-establishment, of the House of Stuart. He was a noted Royalist, and imprisoned briefly in Deal for his pains in 1659 for petitioning for a free parliament. A native of Read more…
Wendy Cope (1945-) published her first collection of poetry `Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ in 1986, after a career as a primary school teacher, an editor and television critic for `The Spectator’. While her output has been slight, with five collections in all of adult poetry, she has gained a Read more…
The work of Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was immensely successful both during his long life, and then reaching a wide new audience through film renditions afterwards. `A Passage to India’ (1924) in particular has enjoyed a large and enthusiastic readership since its publication almost a century ago. Forster’s lightly held, Read more…
While John Leland (1503-1552) is regarded as the founder of the tradition of local history in England, his work had a national range. The work of the slightly later William Lambarde (1536-1601) focussed on Kent and contained far more in detail, as well as a richer description of local customs. Read more…
It is stated emphatically on the website of the Grand Hotel, sitting atop the Leas in Folkestone: `Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express” in the building” (https://grand-uk.com/). This story is duplicated in a number of other places. In the local history museum, in one of its displays; in Read more…
The children’s novel, `Stig of the Dump’ has had a secure hold on the affections of its younger, and older, readers ever since it was published in 1963. Dramatised for television twice, in the early 1980s and then in the 2000s, the name of its caveman protagonist Stig was to Read more…
For people in the latter half of the 20th century, there were two main choices for comprehensive guidebooks about local history and the record of the built environment across the whole of England. One of these was the immense work of the German émigré to Britain Nikolaus Pevsner, `The Buildings Read more…