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…
Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was born in Pennsylvania in the US, and died in London after living there from 1969. He spent no time in Kent, apart from visiting it, in particular on one very important occasion (see below). But the way in which the landscape of the country figures in Read more…
Margate is the location of one of the briefest and most enigmatic of the memory traces left by literature and Kent. T S Eliot (1888-1965) although born in Missouri in the US, had arrived to live in the UK in 1914 via Paris and a spell at Harvard, when he Read more…
Through much of his life, the poet and critic Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) produced work which was informed, and often haunted, by the memory of his childhood in the village of Yalding, near Maidstone. This was despite the searing memory of the First World War, in which he fought and was Read more…
Daniel Defoe’s (1660-1731) links with Kent are not substantial, but they are interesting. The most important, the claim that `The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner’ was written in the west Kent village of Hartley, is almost certainly false. Even so, as an example of Read more…