It’s one of the most famous – indeed infamous – episodes in English literary history. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron took a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva. He was attended by his doctor, John William Polidori, and another nearby house was rented by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom
Here are the answers to the quiz posted last week. The winner will receive a signed first edition of Lynn Shepherd’s new novel, A Treacherous Likeness, which was inspired by the Shelleys. You can read Andrew Taylor’s Spectator review of A Treacherous Likeness here, or subscribe to do so here. 1 Who as a child a) Sent a
Byron may have been mad, bad and dangerous to know, but how’s your knowledge of the rest of the Young Romantics? Are you a connoisseur of Keats, or a specialist on Shelley? Take this light-hearted quiz to find out how much you really know about this dazzling generation of English poets. There are four possible answers
There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years
My favourite Dickens passage is, without question, the opening to Bleak House. That astounding description of the fog and mud in the London streets and the possibility of a megalosaurus ‘forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The manuscript is part of the Dickens exhibition on at the Museum
2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my