Biography – Page 22 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Christopher Lee

Interesting facts about Sir Christopher Lee and his fascinating connections to famous writers

Last week we lost one of Britain’s most talented actors, Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015). Lee was a fascinating man and a gifted actor who, it has frequently been said, had the rare ability to give a good performance even in an otherwise bad film. But there are many surprising literary facts about Christopher Lee, so this is what we, by way of tribute to him, would like to focus on in this post. So without more ado, here are our five great literature-related facts about Christopher Lee.

Five Fascinating Facts about Mark Twain

Fun Mark Twain facts, including his inventions, unusual lecture topics, and numerous pen names

1. Mark Twain wrote a pornographic story set during Elizabethan times. Titled ‘1601’, this bawdy tale – known as a ‘squib’ – was written in 1876 and purports to be the excerpt from a diary written by Queen Elizabeth I’s cup-bearer. Elizabeth has conversations with numerous notable persons of the age, including William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh. When somebody breaks wind, Elizabeth tries to find out who did it. (Spoiler alert: Raleigh did it.) As John Bird notes, ‘one of Twain’s points’ was ‘that the figures we now hold in such high regard habitually used extremely coarse language’.

It is surprising to reflect that neither of the books which are now considered canonical and quintessential Twain – Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn – was Twain’s bestselling book during his lifetime:

Five Fascinating Facts about Ian Fleming

Fun facts about Ian Fleming and his most famous creation, James Bond

1. Ian Fleming named James Bond after an ornithologist because it was the ‘dullest name’ he’d ever heard. The original name for James Bond was ‘James Secretan’; Ian Fleming took the eventual name from the author of a book on birds. The Bond books (and the hugely popular film franchise) are famous for numerous characters and catchphrases: Miss Moneypenny, ‘M’, ‘licence to kill’, ‘shaken not stirred’ (though this is apparently something of a fallacy), and Bond’s gadget and weapons adviser, ‘Q’. Fleming based ‘Q’ in his James Bond novels on a man who wrote Fleming fan letters criticising Bond’s weapon choices.

Five Fascinating Facts about Arnold Bennett

A short biography of Arnold Bennett, author of Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger

1. His first name was actually Enoch. Born in 1867 in Hanley, Staffordshire (part of the famous ‘Potteries’ and now a district of Stoke-on-Trent), Enoch Arnold Bennett was named after his father, a solicitor. Enoch Junior was sent to the school at Newcastle-under-Lyme (‘Oldcastle’ in his fiction), but he only became a successful writer after he had left his hometown in the Potteries. However, he would write about them in much of his fiction. It is an odd fact in the life of Arnold Bennett that he could not perhaps have written so well about his homeland of North Staffordshire if he had remained there. Would James Joyce have been able to write Ulysses if he’d remained in Dublin?

Five Fascinating Facts about Geoffrey Chaucer

Some fun facts about medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer

1. One of Chaucer’s earliest poems was ‘An ABC’, an acrostic which he wrote for people to use in prayer. Like much of Chaucer’s work, ‘An ABC‘ was a Middle English translation of a French work, in this case a prayer written by Guillaume de Deguileville. Each of the 26 eight-line stanzas begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Probably written in the 1370s, the poem shows Chaucer’s art in its early stages of development. (Chaucer had been born in London around 1343 – the precise date of his birth is not known.)