The most significant events in the history of books on the 8th of December 1626: John Davies dies. A minor poet who was championed in the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Davies was an accomplished calligrapher as well as a poet and courtier. This led Jonathan Bate, in his […]
The most significant events in the history of books on the 7th of December 43 BC: Cicero is assassinated. As well as being an influential orator and writer, Cicero rose to be a hugely powerful statesman in Rome, and he clashed with the consul, Mark Antony, who declared Cicero an […]
The most significant events in the history of books on the 6th of December 1478: Baldassare Castiglione is born. This Italian soldier and diplomat is best remembered for The Book of the Courtier (1528), a book written over many years in the form of a philosophical dialogue. It sums up Renaissance […]
The most significant events in the history of books on the 5th of December 1784: Phillis Wheatley dies. The first black poet of the Americas to publish a book, Wheatley was an eighteenth-century black slave taught to read by her owners. She composed over 100 poems in her lifetime. You can […]
The most significant events in the history of books on the 4th of December 1131: Omar Khayyám dies. This Persian poet and mathematician wrote the Rubaiyat (or ‘quatrains’), later translated into English by several Victorian poets, most famously by Edward FitzGerald. 1835: Samuel Butler is born. This unusual Victorian novelist is best known […]