Five fascinating facts about fictional asylums
By Anne Goodwin In my professional life as a clinical psychologist, I visited around a dozen of the hundred or so long-stay psychiatric hospitals in England and Wales. Since then,…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Compiled by Annabel The Royal Society of Literature is celebrating ‘Dalloway Day‘ today – a Wednesday in the middle of June – when Virginia Woolf’s novel in a day is…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Daphne du Maurier
Compiled by Annabel Ali at her blog, Heavenali, is hosting Daphne du Maurier reading week from May 13-19, so we’re joining in. One: Jamaica Inn, the setting for her famous novel of…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Anthony Burgess
Compiled by Annabel Researching Burgess for this article, I found so many nuggets, I could easily have compiled a list of fifty facts – or even more! It was difficult…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Arnold Bennett
Compiled by Julie Barham 1.Bennett was an ardent Francophile, frequently looking to France as a source of literary inspiration. He would moor his yacht and paint views from peaceful French…
Five Fascinating Facts About… A.A. Milne
Written by Simon Thomas 1.) A.A. Milne had a famous schoolteacher. A.A. Milne’s father John ran a small boys’ school, Henley House, and one of the teachers he employed was a…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Vita Sackville-West
Compiled by Simon Vita Sackville-West is probably best remembered today as the inamorata of Virginia Woolf or the garden designer behind Sissinghurst. Less remembered, on the whole, are her novels –…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Richmal Crompton
Written by Simon The author of the much loved William books, about a well-meaning but disastrous young boy, also wrote over thirty books for adults, some of which have now…
Five Fascinating Facts about … Margaret Atwood
By Shoshi Ish-Horowicz 1. She had an unconventional childhood with her family, spending every spring and summer in the northern Canadian wilderness; Atwood didn’t start full time school until the…
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015)
By Harriet Devine Ruth Rendell’s death on 2 May this year has brought to an end a career spanning an astonishing fifty years. By the time you are reading this,…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Compiled by the Shiny editors. We join in the celebrations of the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with our own little tribute: 1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland started off…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Winston Graham
Compiled by Annabel. 1. Born in 1908 in Manchester, the Graham family moved to Perranporth in Cornwall when Winston was seventeen. He stayed there until 1959, eventually settling in East…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Virginia Woolf
Written by Simon Thomas We’re featuring a few Virginia Woolf titles in this issue, so it seemed a good time to turn attention to her in our Five Fascinating Facts…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Anthony Trollope
Compiled by Harriet 1. Born in 1815, Trollope had a miserable childhood. His father lost all his money, he was bullied at school, and he contemplated suicide when he was…
Five Fascinating Facts about… E.F. Benson
By Guy Fraser-Sampson. 1. His father was Archbishop of Canterbury. Through this connection Benson gained privileged access to high society, including royalty and the aristocracy. He remained friends with some members of…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Frances Hodgson Burnett
Compiled by Harriet Devine 1. Frances was born near Manchester, in England. Her father was a successful ironmonger, but her family fell on hard times after his death when she…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Robert Aickman
Winkled out by Annabel Gaskell 1. Although we’ve come to know Aickman as an author, he was a prominent conservationist. In 1946, he was a co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association….
Five Fascinating Facts About… Alexander Pushkin
Written by Karen Langley 1. His matrilineal great grandfather was a Black African Page brought over to Russia as a slave. Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781) was kidnapped and taken to Russia…
Five Fascinating Facts about Rumer Godden
Compiled by Victoria Best As an accompaniment to Harriet’s review of Rumer Godden novels An Episode of Sparrows and The Dark Horse, here are five things you might not know about the perennially popular…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Nathanael West
Compiled by Oliver Tearle To accompany our review of Daunt Books’ new reprint of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, reviewed here, we’ve asked Oliver Tearle to give us Five Fascinating Facts about…