Since the festive season is almost upon us, we’ve gathered together the twelve most interesting literature-related facts about Christmas that we could find. So here they are, ‘The Twelve Facts of Christmas’ … with a literary link. We hope you like them. 1. Christina Rossetti wrote the words to the Christmas carol ‘In […]
Other News
Ten Words We Got from Literature
Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, ‘Shakespeare gave us the word puking’ or ‘Milton coined the word dreary’. The problem with this is, of course, that we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words – they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words […]
Shakespeare and the Essay
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 […]
C. S. Lewis and the Inklings
One of the most celebrated pubs for writers is the Eagle and Child in Oxford. This public house on St Giles’, known informally as the ‘Bird and Baby’, was the place where the Inklings met during the mid-twentieth century. The ‘Inklings’ were a group of writers living in Oxford who […]
Dickens and Catchphrases
The word ‘catchphrase’ first appears in print around 1850 (according to the OED), and so the birth of the phenomenon of the catchphrase (at least as a labelled and understood term) coincides somewhat with Charles Dickens’s own career as a writer. One of the biggest catchphrases of the 1830s and […]