Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Compiling a list of the best Edgar Allan Poe short stories is always going to prove controversial, because he wrote many more classics than a ‘top 10’ list could ever dream of comprehensively capturing. So the following does involve some omissions – ‘The Pit and […]
Mark Twain’s 18 rules for writing – part of his response to the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the writer who once observed, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.’ (We include that pithy gem in our selection […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]