In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Tom Burnam’s little-known dictionary of misinformation Joan of Arc wasn’t French. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. Winston Churchill didn’t coin the phrase ‘iron curtain’. The ‘grey’ in ‘greyhound’ has nothing to do with the colour. The […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle escapes to early twentieth-century London with the crime-fighting Four Just Men There is something irresistibly inspiring about an author who rose from humble beginnings to become popular and successful. J. K. Rowling is the most notable recent example. Charles […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Guy Boothby’s fiendish fin de siècle creation What happens if you cross Professor Moriarty with his arch-nemesis Sherlock Holmes, add in a bit of Svengali from George du Maurier’s Trilby, a dash of archetypal James Bond villain, and […]