As the nights are beginning to draw in and Halloween approaches, how about something to make the flesh creep and send a shiver down the spine? Charles Dickens was a master of the macabre, whether it’s in his Christmas ghost stories such as A Christmas Carol, in the chilling Gothic […]
By Karen Langley 1. His matrilineal great grandfather was a black African page brought over to Russia as a slave. Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781) was kidnapped and taken to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Gannibal was educated in France to the profession of a military engineer, later progressing […]
Perhaps ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘quotes’ is a marriage made in literary heaven. He is eminently quotable, which has made choosing Oscar Wilde’s ten best quotes that much more difficult. Difficult, but fun. After looking through the literary library here at Interesting Literature we can now bring you our ten favourite Wildean one-liners! […]
At the moment, Maxine Peake is playing Hamlet at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. The promotional blurb for the production on the Royal Exchange website states that Peake ‘creates a Hamlet for now, a Hamlet for Manchester’. But a woman playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet is, actually, nothing new. Numerous women have […]
In this special guest post, Harriet Devine from Shiny New Books looks at the author of children’s classic The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett… 1. Frances was born near Manchester, England. Her father was a successful ironmonger, but her family fell on hard times after his death when she was only three. […]