The best fictional detectives who were contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes If you’re a fan of Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories, or the BBC TV series Sherlock, you may well be looking for other great detectives from the golden era of the detective short story to discover and enjoy. Here’s our […]
The best words to describe language-related experiences, reading, and other related phenomena Logos is the very first word of the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. (Logos means ‘word’.) And ‘logos’, it turns out, has given us a raft of great wordy words – word-related terms which describe […]
The life and work of the poet Thomas Chatterton, told through five bits of trivia 1. Chatterton was, in effect, the first English Romantic poet. Before William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Thomas Chatterton (1752-177o) was laying the groundwork for a revolution in English verse. Chatterton was perhaps […]
Facts about the life of Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney 1. Philip Sidney invented the name Pamela. Sidney (1554-1586) was a true ‘Renaissance man’: soldier, statesman, poet, diplomat, and – it would appear – coiner of popular girls’ names. Or at least this one name. Pamela appears in Sidney’s […]
The life and work of philosopher and writer Herbert Spencer, in five pieces of trivia 1. He had a bit of a fling with novelist George Eliot. The friendship of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Mary Ann Evans (or George Eliot) represents a true meeting of minds: Eliot was a multi-talented writer, […]