Book Reviews – Page 18 – Interesting Literature

Book Review: David Gemmell, Rhyming Rings

In a new series of posts, Dispatches from the Secret Library, our founder-editor Dr Oliver Tearle considers a surprising title from his bookshelves

When the British fantasy author David Gemmell died in summer 2006, he had been hard at work on Fall of Kings, the final volume in his epic trilogy retelling the story of the siege of Troy from Homer’s Iliad. His widow, Stella, heroically took on the task of completing the novel, working from her late husband’s notes. When Troy: Fall of Kings (Trojan War Trilogy): 3 was published the following year, his legions of fans thought it was the last new David Gemmell title we would ever see published.

The Best Literary Facts about London

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

We’ve recently been enjoying the wonderful book, Literary London, by Eloise Millar and Sam Jordison. It’s that rare thing: a book that includes something interesting on every page.

An Interesting Review of The Third QI Book of General Ignorance

The most interesting things about literary classics we learnt from the new QI book

Here at Interesting Literature we’re fans of the BBC TV show QI, hosted by Stephen Fry and created by John Lloyd, the producer of such British comedy classics as Blackadder and Spitting Image. We’re lucky enough to count the makers of the programme among our Twitter friends, and they’ve even cited us as the source for some of the facts in one of their previous books (namely the fascinating fact-filled 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways). We also love the QI spirit: for those of you who don’t know the show, the idea is to look more closely at widely held beliefs (and ‘facts’) in order to discover how true they really are. A cornerstone of the QI ‘philosophy’ is the notion of debunking misconceptions, something that can be traced back at least as far as Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century natural philosopher, who is the subject of one of our earlier posts (and who, quite neatly, was the first person to use the word ‘misconception’). Like Snopes.com (named, by the way, after a family from William Faulkner‘s novels), the QI spirit entails examining and then, where necessary, correcting the ‘truths’ we hold so dear.

Interesting Facts about Pride and Prejudice

2013 marks the bicentenary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, surely Jane Austen’s most famous novel. Over 20 million copies are thought to have been sold worldwide. Here at Interesting Literature we thought we’d look around for some interesting facts concerning this Austen classic.

Things You May Not Know about The Water-Babies

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Charles Kingsley was an eccentric who once made friends with a wasp which he saved from drowning. He gave a Devon village its name. He gave us a number of words and phrases still in common use. His most famous work, The Water-Babies, is an odd book which is at once a children’s classic, a moral fable, a response to the theory of evolution, and a satire on Victorian attitudes to child labour and religion.