There is a story that, while serving as a young cadet, Edgar Allan Poe was expelled for reporting to a military march wearing nothing but a pair of white gloves. It appears that this is an urban legend, but there are many aspects of Poe’s life and work which are […]
We at Interesting Literature felt it was about time we saluted a truly modern man, Thomas Paine (1737-1809). A story from the 1960s shows just how inflammatory this champion of freedom, equality, and independence still is, even in more recent times. In 1964 the mayor of Thetford in Norfolk (Paine’s hometown) […]
Essays: we’ve all written them, whether as school projects or as university assignments. (For those going through esay trauma, we’ve even compiled a list of some of our favourite tips for writing a good English Literature essay.) But where did the essay form come from? It was effectively invented by […]
The man who, among many other achievements, inspired two television programmes, Big Brother and Room 101, and painted a chilling dystopian portrayal of a totalitarian state in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, also unofficially provided the blueprint for many of the pubs in modern Britain. George Orwell was an influential essayist as […]