The Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1983 William Golding (1911-1993) was born in Cornwall, and educated first at Marlborough and then Oxford. His first job after graduating from university, however, just before the Second World War in 1938 was as an English and Music Teacher at Maidstone Grammar School. The Read more…
The poet Richard Lovelace (1617-1657) as a detailed article from the Archaeologica Cantiana from 1876 by the Reverend A J Pearman makes clear, came from a long line of landowners in Kent, stretching back to the start of the 15th century (https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/Research/Pub/ArchCant/010%20-%201876/010-17.pdf) Pearman’s interest had been sparked by Lovelace Place Read more…
Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (a title she inherited on the death of a relative later in her life, 1661-1720) is a fascinating and accomplished figures whose life straddles a number of different political phases in British history, and who had to navigate the competing allegiances between them, finding herself sometimes Read more…
Merchant and translator William Caxton (c1415-1424 to c1491) has in influence as a pioneer and standardizer of the English language at a key moment in its evolution that means he might rank as one of the most influential figure in this collection, even if this is not due to his Read more…
As a politician and war leader, Winston Churchill (1875-1965) has been the subject of too many biographies, studies, television programmes and documentaries to list. As a writer, however, while there is plenty of material, it is probably slightly less concentrated on. It was, however, for this latter aspect of his Read more…
The novelist, journalist and entrepreneur George Macarthur (1814-1879) is largely forgotten today. And yet during his lifetime he was as, if not more, successful than his great contemporary Charles Dickens. His novels were widely translated, including into Urdu, and were popular in Britain and the United States. In particular, his Read more…
The novelist Graham Swift (1949-) was born and educated in London, and then at Cambridge and York universities. His `Last Orders’ (1996) is like a contemporary rendition of the `Canterbury Tales’ by Chaucer (see entry for him). Unlike Chaucer, however, Swift’s secular `pilgrims,’ some of them veterans of the Second Read more…
Erasmus (1466-1536) personifies the renaissance at its peak – a priestly polyglot who, centuries before globalisation, shifted between different territories and environments, and who contributed to ethics, theology, biblical studies, and through work as a translator. He was also a formidable Latin prose stylist. He studied and taught at universities Read more…
From what slender evidence there is, the poet Sarah Dixon (1671-1765) spent almost all of her long life in Kent. The daughter of a barrister from the Middle Temple, she was probably born in Rochester, but moved with her family to the area around Canterbury, either at Hackington, or Newnham, Read more…
The works of Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) seemingly belong to everyone, everywhere, and relate to nowhere. They take place `through the looking class; or `in wonderland’ – with no real association with any specific terrain in the Britain that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the mathematician who lay behind the Carroll pseudonym, lived Read more…