Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses. Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place. Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War. He was commended for h...

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,...

Robert Barr was born in Glasgow, Scotland on the 16th September 1849. Five years later the family emigrated to a farm near Muirkirk in Upper Canada.His early years were uneventful as the family settled into their new lives and Barr began his education.A career path as a teacher opened up for him and, by 1874, he had been appointed as headmaster at the Central School at Windsor. Concurrently he also wrote travel and humourous articles for magazines. Within two years their su...

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...

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 David Winser.

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 Martin Swayne.

Walter Lionel George was born to British parents on the 20th March 1882 in Paris, France.It was not until he was a young man of 20 that he learned English. In 1905 he moved to London to work in an office but soon found himself working as a journalist, and as a foreign correspondent, for various London newspapers.By 1911, with the publication of his first novel ‘A Bed of Roses’, which portrayed the fall of a penniless young woman into prostitution, his efforts were rewarded,...

Ethel Lina White was born on the 2nd April 1876 in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, in Wales.Her family were wealthy due to her father’s invention of a waterproofing material used, initially, for the London Underground.Ethel started writing when she was only a child and published essays and poems in children’s papers. She was also a talented artist.As an adult she began to write short stories and, some years later, she started writing novels. At the time she was working ...

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 Violet Jacob.

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 J Jefferson Farjeon.

John Galsworthy was born on the 14th August 1867 on the family estate, Parkfield, in Kingston-upon-Thames. His family’s wealth came from the shipping industryAt age nine he began his education at Saugeen, a Bournemouth preparatory school, before moving to Harrow school in 1881, distinguishing himself as an athlete.Galsworthy attended New College, Oxford to read law and left with a second-class degree with honours in 1889. The bar called him in 1890 but Galsworthy decided he...

Gustav Meyrink was born in Vienna on the 19th January, 1868.As a young man he co-founded a bank in Prague, but a personal crisis and a suicide attempt turned his life away from commerce to a study of the occult and a career in literature.His early short stories, supernatural, occult and weird, are full of promise, menace and the unusual.In 1915 he published his landmark novel ‘Der Golem’ and followed these with others which, whilst noted, failed to achieve the extra...