The era of Roman Britain from 44CE to around 409CE remains one of continuing fascination to many people. Charlotte Higgins captured this well in `Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain’ (Abrams, 2015), a contemporary description of her tours around the remnants of this period dotted across the UK. Some Read more…
The great diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) kept his record from the age of 27 in 1660 for almost a decade. He wrote it in a form of shorthand, which allowed him to refer with candour not just to his work and professional life, but to his multiple infidelities, against his Read more…
The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was born In India, died in France, and lived in places as various as Cyprus, Greece, Provence, Egypt, Belgrade and Corfu. His greatest work, `The Alexandria Quartet’ (1957-1960) is set far away from England in the eponymous city where he tracks the lives, Read more…
Ford Madox Ford (he was born with the surname Hueffer, but due to the First World War, changed this to sound less German!) was born in 1873. He is largely remembered now for at least one novel, `The Good Soldier’, published in 1915. Grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Read more…
Famous as much for the people she knew (one extended affair was with Virginia Woolf), and the places she lived (the grand house of Knole near Sevenoaks, where she was born, and the smaller but equally impressive Sissinghurst, in the Weald) as for her literary works, Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) spent Read more…
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is so closely associated with other parts of Britain, that it would be churlish to claim much of him for Kent. However, the few poems he wrote that do refer explicitly to this area covered over three decades of his career and are significant because of the Read more…
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) remains celebrated as one of the most prolific, and imaginative, writers about the future and the possibilities (and threats) of technological development, whose various books and short stories from the last decade of the 19th century to his death over fifty years later helped to describe, Read more…
Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989), author of, amongst other works, `Rebecca’ (1938), `Jamaica Inn’ (1936) and `My Cousin Rachel’ (1951), was a native of London, though her father, the actor and impresario Sir Gerald du Maurier may have possibly owned the Medieval Slaybrook Hall in Sandgate, near Hythe. Du Maurier herself Read more…
Mervyn Peake, like David Jones, worked across literature and visual art, with the two kinds of work complementing each other. Born in 1911 in Jiangxi province, just as the Qing dynasty was falling as a result of the Xinhai, his father and mother were congregationalist missionaries. Briefly based in Britain Read more…
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…