Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on the 1st April 1875 in Greenwich, London. Leaving school at 12 because of truancy, by the age of fifteen he had experience; selling newspapers, as a worker in a rubber factory, as a shoe shop assistant, as a milk delivery boy and as a ship’s cook.By 1894 he was engaged but broke it off to join the Infantry being posted to South Africa. He also changed his name to Edgar Wallace which he took from Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.In ...

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society.In literature the ambition is much narrower. In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published. And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading. Obviously for most of humanity’s time people couldn’t read and texts couldn’t be publishe...

Karl Hans Strӧbl was born in Jihlava, Moravia in the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the 18th of January 1877.His education finished with his studies at the University of Prague, where he became involved in nationalist student politics, a precursor to his later right-wing and anti-semitic viewpoints.In 1910 he wrote an apocalyptic novel ‘Eleagabal Kuperus’, which was later adapted into a silent film.His literary output was prolific and r...

Leslie Harrison Lambert was born on 11th November 1883 in Nottingham.After attending Rugby School he trained to be a surveyor. One of his passions was magic and such was his prowess that he joined The Magic Circle, and performed at society events.By the beginning of World War I he was an amateur radio ham and volunteered to work at a coastguard station in Norfolk to intercept German radio transmissions. By November 1914 he was with the Admiralty at Naval Intelligence Room 4...

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remain...

One of the ‘truths’ about writers is that after a successful first book the agonies of the second devour both time and talent. For Daniel Sheehan that seems to have been turned on its head. Rather than go forward it was easier to look back, to dredge rather than furrow, gathering words, lines and phrases from the past and re-fashioning, distilling and evolving poems of simplicity, complexity, light and dark. Sometimes very dark.His work is often characterized by a modern, intimate,...

The Detective has been a mainstay of fiction writing ever since we can remember.Their deductive powers, their intuition and fleet-footed grasp of every detail can often turn the unlikeliest situation, or bunch of red herrings, into a breakthrough to capture even the most ingenious and dastardly of criminals.In this series our classic authors explore not only various themes, such as Occult Detectives, Female Detectives, Curious Crimes and a whole host more, but also bring a ...

Lettice Galbraith is yet another of those mysterious women of British literature of whom little was recorded.Lizzie Susan Gibson was born on the 27th January 1859 in Kingston-Upon-Hull in Yorkshire into a comfortable middle-class family.Her education was primarily private but at fifteen her father died, and life became rather different.After several years in London, she moved with her mother to Reigate in Surrey.In 1885 she published her first story anonymou...

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poet...

The bookshelves of European literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Villiers de I'Isle-Adam.

The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is the Welsh writer Francis Brett Young.

A fascinating journey through the history of railways, packed with first-hand accounts of innovation, triumph, and tragedy.From the earliest steam engine to the high-speed bullet trains of today, A Short History of the Railway reveals the hidden stories of railway history across the world - the inspired engineering; the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the construction of the tracks; the ground-breaking innovations behind the trains that travelled along them;...