In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a forty-year-old book debunking various widely held beliefs Last year, I reviewed a fascinating book, The dictionary of misinformation, written by a professor of English named Tom Burnam and published in 1975. Although it’s now out of print, […]
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 […]
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 […]
He is credited with coining dozens of new words which are still in common use. He died on his birthday. Some of his writing was first published without his permission. His works, when first published in the seventeenth century, proved hugely successful and influential. This description could easily fit William […]