Writing – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about The Jungle Book

Fun trivia about Rudyard Kipling’s classic work of literature, The Jungle Book, that inspired the Disney film

1. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, personally requested Kipling’s permission to use names and symbols from The Jungle Book in his new cub-scout movement. Baden-Powell had already taken Scouting ideas from Kipling: Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim had given Baden-Powell the idea for the Memory Game (called the ‘Jewel Game’ in Kipling’s novel) which Baden-Powell would use in boys’ cub-scout training. The idea for the game is simple: Kim, a teenager who is in India to be trained as a spy, is presented with a tray containing a number of jewels on it. The shopkeeper, Lurgan, tells him: ‘Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for me. When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib. I will write mine.’ The illusionist Derren Brown has used a similar game in his live shows and television programmes.

12 Interesting Facts about Dictionaries

Have you heard the one-line joke, usually attributed to Steven Wright, about the dictionary? ‘I finally got around to reading the dictionary’, it goes. ‘Turns out the zebra did it.’ It’s a good joke, but of course ‘zebra’ isn’t the last word in any English dictionary worth the name (what about ‘zoo’, for starters?), and besides, Steven Wright probably never said it. Still, we’ll overlook that and get on with this post comprising a dozen of the choicest and most fascinating facts about dictionaries down the ages.

The first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, described itself as being ‘for the benefit of Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’.

Chambers Dictionary defines a kazoo as ‘a would-be musical instrument’ and an éclair as ‘a cake, long in shape but short in duration’.

10 Interesting Facts about Famous Writers at School

Fun facts about the schooldays of well-known authors and other literary types

September is the ‘back to school’ month, so to take the edge off that inevitable sinking feeling, we’ve put together ten great facts about the schooldays of famous writers. Some authors have been teachers, but all have been schoolchildren at some point. Here’s our pick of the best facts about writers at school. We’ve included a link on some authors’ names to previous interesting posts we’ve written about them.

Samuel Johnson had only three pupils enrol at the school he opened in his hometown of Lichfield in the 1730s. However, one of those three pupils was the actor David Garrick, who later followed Johnson to London to seek his fortune.

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the word ‘pedant’ as a ‘schoolmaster’. (More facts about Johnson’s Dictionary here.)

Five Fascinating Facts about Mary Shelley

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Her most famous novel, Frankenstein, is widely considered the first science fiction novel.

Brian Aldiss certainly thinks so. It’s worth mentioning here that two other leading science (fiction) writers, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, argued that the honour of ‘first science-fiction novel’ should go to a much earlier book: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (‘The Dream’), first published in 1634.

The Best Sourced Dorothy Parker Quotes

10 of the best quotes from Dorothy Parker and where they first appeared

We’ve compiled a list of ten of the wittiest and wisest quotations from the Dorothy Parker oeuvre, as well as some of her pithiest and most memorable one-liners. Many quotations have been attributed to Parker, but here we’ve confined ourselves to the things that she definitely did say.

There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words. – Interview in Paris Review, 1956

I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more. – ‘The Little Hours’, 1939