From 1926 to 1956, the British actor and writer Noel Coward (1899-1973) maintained a country house in Kent, and was a frequent visitor. Born in the highly unexotic Teddington, Middlesex, the son of a piano salesman, through his mother’s family he was related to a long series of naval figures, Read more…
The first encounter with the short ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) is very similar to the usual pattern of the tales he tells. Usually located in reassuringly secure environments – libraries, college quads, gardens, comfortable old buildings thoroughly inhabited and domesticated – these are slowly but surely undermined Read more…
The local heritage museum celebrating the creation of Rupert Bear in Canterbury closed in 2018. This was unfortunate, in and of itself, but also symbolically, because it was just two years shy of the centenary of the first date the cartoon bear had appeared, in November 2020 in the Daily Read more…
The Anglo-French writer Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) remains best known today as the author of the 1907 `Cautionary Tales for Children’ with its often comically violent accounts of what happens to misbehaving youngsters. Belloc, son of a French father and English mother, produced more than 150 books, and Read more…
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) continues to enjoy global fame through his creation, Sherlock Holmes, based, according to his own words, on Joseph Bell, a teacher at his university while studying medicine in Edinburgh in the 1880s. Doyle’s life was an extraordinary mixture. He practiced medicine, played football for Portsmouth Read more…
John Buchan (1875-1940) is regarded as the father of the modern spy novel, and exercised a huge influence over the young Ian Fleming. His celebrated `The Thirty-Nine Steps’ (1915) captured the admiration of no less a figure than Alfred Hitchcock who rendered it into film in 1935. It was filmed Read more…
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was one of the finest short story writers and novelists of the twentieth century in English. Her writing, ironic, subtle, often conveying in a single line enough for a whole chapter about the characters she describes, shifts between the landscape of her native Ireland, and the London Read more…
If Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon celebrated the softer side of the Kentish countryside in some of their works, contrasting it with their searing memories of the First World War (with H E Bates a little later chipping in), George Orwell’s brief, but formative, experience of hop picking in Kent Read more…