Curated category
English essayists
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
- Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse on the 28th of March 1941, her pockets weighted with stones. She had just finished her last novel, Between the…
- Alexander PopeAlexander Pope was born in London on the 21st of May 1688, the very year the Glorious Revolution upended the English throne.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- Samuel JohnsonSamuel Johnson was touched by Queen Anne on the 30th of March 1712, when he was barely two years old, in a ritual meant to cure the scrofula scarring his…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy.
- James Wood (critic)James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, and by his mid-twenties he had made himself into one of the most…
- Mary WollstonecraftOn the 10th of September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia, eleven days after giving birth to a daughter. That daughter, also named Mary, would…
- Arthur C. ClarkeIn February 1945, a young radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke sent a letter to the editor of Wireless World. He suggested that stations placed in…
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades…
- Francis BaconFrancis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a…
- Thomas Robert MalthusThomas Robert Malthus was born on the 13th or the 14th of February 1766 at The Rookery, a small elegant mansion near Dorking in Surrey.
- John DrydenJohn Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden.
- Edward GibbonIt was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house…
- John AubreyJohn Aubrey was born on the 12th of March 1626 into a prosperous gentry family in Wiltshire, and he would spend much of his adult life in a state of…
- Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison was born in Cottingham, Yorkshire on the 9th of September 1850. Her father worked as a timber merchant while her mother died of puerperal…