Israel Zangwill was born in London on 21st January 1864, to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire.Zangwill was initially educated in Plymouth and Bristol. At age 9 he was enrolled in the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields in east London. Zangwill excelled here. He began to teach part-time at the school and eventually full time. Whilst teaching he also studied with the University of London and by 1884 had earned his BA with triple honours in philosophy, history, and t...

Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget on 4th October 1856 in Boulogne, France to intellectual expatriate British parents.In common with several other very talented literary women of the day she felt it necessary to publish under a masculine pseudonym in order for her writing to be taken seriously. Indeed she seems to have adopted that persona across her whole lifestyle becoming personally known and acknowledged by all as Vernon Lee and accordingly dressed as a man.Her first publ...

Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.” Millions of travelers have since followed Bingham’s advice. When Bingham first encountered Machu Picchu, the site was an obscure ruin. Now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu is the focus of Peru’s tourism economy. Mark Rice’s hi...

Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and en...

Short stories and poetry: written by three Irish writers, two living in Wexford and one in Dublin who worked together virtually during the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020. All writing is fictional, some relating to the virus and its effects, others reflecting different topics inspired during the time. Writing the book provided the writers with an escape and they took comfort in the task.We hope it provides insights into a unique time and living during a global pandemic but mostly that it...

Murder in Maspalomas is a novel which starts in Dublin where Matt, an ordinary contract accountant finds himself contacted by the Sullivans, a notorious drug gang who are chasing a debt.The gang are led by Anto, a thirty something who came from a broken family, he broke it. His enforcer, Ciaran is his second in command and a right nasty piece of work who carries a piece wherever he goes. Rocky, in his early twenties wants to be Ciaran and wants to get tooled up. He carries some men...

Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, or more familiarly, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, was born on the 23rd September 1865, in Tarnaörs, Heves County, Hungary.The family lived in their ancestral home; a great, rambling farmhouse on the river Tarna. Orczy’s memories of the time were of sophisticated parties, sparkling conversation, joyful dancing and gypsy music. But fear of a peasant uprising meant moving to Budapest and then many years of semi-nomadic travels across...

John Ferguson was born on the 18th August 1881 in Stirling in Scotland.He attended the High School there and little other information is available.It is known that he worked primarily in the banking industry.His literary canon is exceedingly small, this being the only volume of his poems ever published. What is known is that he suffered from ill-health and these poems were written whilst in a sanitorium.The book itself was very successful after its publicati...

Joseph Conrad was born on 3rd December 1857 in Berdychiv in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His birthplace had been part of Poland which its neighbours dismembered into their own Empires.Conrad’s early years were spent in constant movement, his father was politically active and frequently in trouble trying to help re-ignite a Polish state which meant arrests and exile and the young Conrad himself suffered from ill-health, spending a year at a retreat in Kyiv recoverin...

Israel Zangwill was born in London on 21st January 1864, to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire.Zangwill was initially educated in Plymouth and Bristol. At age 9 he was enrolled in the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields in east London. Zangwill excelled here. He began to teach part-time at the school and eventually full time. Whilst teaching he also studied with the University of London and by 1884 had earned his BA with triple honours in philosophy, history, and t...

Mary Gladys Meredith was born on 25th March 1881 at Leighton Lodge in the village of Leighton, near Shrewsbury in Shropshire.Mary was home-schooled by her father before being sent to a finishing school in Southport in 1895. Her longs walks in the countryside helped her develop a heightened sense of observation and description, of both people and places, which later infused both her poetry and prose.When she was 20 she developed symptoms of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorde...

Sax Rohmer was born on February 15th, 1883 as Arthur Henry Sarsfield in Birmingham to working class parents.Rohmer started his career as a civil servant but soon had ambitions to change careers and write full time.Not content with just fiction he wrote poetry, songs as well as comedy sketches for music hall performers. From these varied beginnings he reinvented himself as Sax Rohmer.He first published in 1903, age 20, with the short story ‘The Mysterious Mummy’ in t...