Young Bede – he was to become the best known author of his age. One of the forefathers of British writing. Bettany Hughes, Seven Ages of Britain 410 A.D. – 1066 A.D. Channel 4 2003
‘Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American. But his palate was incredibly wide, and delicious, and violent, and brutal, and ugly. All of those things.’ Hemingway I, Michael Katakis, BBC 2021
Ernest Hemingway remade American literature. He pared story-telling to its essentials. Changed the way characters speak. Expanded the worlds a writer could legitimately explore, and left an indelible record of how men and women lived in his lifetime. ibid.
Behind the public figure was a troubled and conflicted man who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family with its own drama and darkness and closely held secrets. ibid.
‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.’ ibid. Hemingway
‘You see, I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across. Not to just depict life, or criticise it. But to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well.’ Hemingway II
With the help of sympathetic friends, Hemingway would publish two slender books, three stories and ten poems, and In Our Time. ibid.
By the time A Fairwell to Arms topped the best-seller list in 1929 colourful stories had already begun to circulate about Ernest Hemingway, many of them told by the writer himself … It became harder and harder to tell the real Hemingway from the one he had created. Hemingway III
‘All stories if continued far enough end in death.’ ibid.
What was happening in his beloved Spain was beginning to change his mind. It was now being torn apart by a civil war. Early in 1936 reactionary elements of the army eventually led by a fascist general named Francisco Franco and supported by wealthy industrialists, great landowners and the Catholic Church joined forces to try to overthrow the duly elected socialist government. Hitler provided Franco and his rebels with bombers and fighter planes and German pilots to fly them. Their goal was to terrorise the civilian population. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dispatched tanks and nearly 80,000 troops. Within weeks, Franco’s forces had seized one third of the country from those faithful to the government … Between 30-40,000 men from more than 50 countries would answer the call. ibid.
When the writer Martha Gellhorn, a family friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, introduced herself to Ernest Hemingway at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s in December 1936 she was 28 years old, 9 years younger than he. Hemingway IV
Hemingway’s sons would come to visit and begin to get to know the woman with whom their father was openly living. ibid.
When For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, Marxist critics attacked the novel as a betrayal of their cause because it showed sympathy for the war’s victims on both sides. ibid.
On May 17th 1944 Ernest Hemingway arrived in London, assigned by Collier’s magazine to cover the Allied invasion of France, now less than three weeks away. He was 44 years old but seemed much older, and felt that the luck that had kept him alive through two wars would likely not continue through another. Hemingway V
‘Nothing is mine’, she [Mary Welsh] wrote. ‘The man is his own with various adjuncts: his writing, his children, his cats. The strip of bed where I lie is not mine’. But she stayed. ibid.
The Old Man and the Sea he wrote in just eight weeks. Hemingway VI
For many readers A Moveable Feast, a combination of what had really happened and what Hemingway wished had happened, would be his final masterpiece. ibid.
The most satirical novelist of the 1930s … ever popular with readers to this day. Waugh was born into a comfortable literary middle-class family in London … He then stumbled into teaching. Evelyn Waugh: Face to Face, BBC 2021
Southern Italy has inspired a wealth of amazing authors … Elena Ferrante: My Brilliant Friend [Naples] … Charles Dickens: Pictures from Italy … Robert Harris: Pompeii … Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley … Carlo Levi: Christ Stopped at Eboli. Write Around the World with Richard E Grant, BBC 2021
150 years ago Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Kidnapped and Treasure Island travelled 120 miles across this region [southern France] on foot with only a donkey for company. Write Around the World with Richard E Grant II: Southern France
Umberto Eco: The Count of Monte Cristo … F Scott Fitzgerald … Carol Drinkwater: The Olive Farm … Elizabeth David … Patrick Suskind: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer … ibid.
Granada: The city that inspired one of Spain’s most acclaimed figures … It’s most famous playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca who was born just outside the city. Write Around the World with Richard E Grant III
Victoria Hislop: The Return tackles the civil war and its aftermath … Chris Stewart … Ernest Hemingway: Born in 1899, Hemingway was passionate about Spain … Laurie Lee: A lifelong love affair with this country … J G Ballard: Cocaine Nights. ibid.
What an extraordinary journey from a poor cottage in Dorset to being buried twice: once in Westminster Abbey with his coffin held aloft by Rudyard Kipling, the prime minister and once with his heart being buried in Dorset. Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion & Tragedy, Sky Arts 2021
Hardy is irrevocably associated with his creation of the region of Wessex. ibid.
Dominated by a sense of being between classes, he loved London society but never felt part of it. ibid.
He found the cruelty of the world unbearable … But deep in his inner self, Thomas Hardy remained that raging wounded self who chastised the values of the world he inhabited. ibid.
If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists. Virginia Woolf
Thomas Hardy: The Wessex Novels are not one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably, they are full of imperfections – some are failures, and others exhibit only the wrong side of the marker’s genius. But undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness of life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. Virginia Woolf
There was no more quintessentially English writer than Agatha Christie. Through her sensational murder mysteries she created a literary universe that captured our national spirit like no-one before or since. The magical worlds where she set her stories are in fact drawn from real places. Agatha Christie’ England, Channel 5 2021
Born 1890 in the Devon town of Torquay. The youngest to three children she lived a charmed life thanks to her American fathers large inheritance. ibid.
138,813. She introduced the world to Miss Marple when she published The Murder at the Vicarage. ibid.
In 1920 Agatha published her debut novel: The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The lead character was the now iconic Belgium detective Hercules Poirot. ibid.
‘Agatha absolutely abhorred the loss of empire, the changing attitudes to British dominance over the world. This big change in social values, the class system.’ ibid. J C Bernthal, Agatha Christie scholar
Arguably the biggest writer of the Twentieth Century. ibid.
Walter Scott remains one of the world’s most famous writers. The pioneer of a new literary genre – historical fiction. He changed the way the world viewed Scotland and how Scots view ourselves. In Search of Sir Walter Scott, BBC 2021
Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were two of the most famous American writers of their time. For more than forty years, these two giants of American literature goaded and supported one another in the agonizing quest to turn life into art. Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, captions, 2020
‘I am very personable as a writer. I don’t mean to be. I just am. Unavoidable.’ ibid. Williams, David Frost Show
Both writers earned public acclaim early in their careers: Tennessee with The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and Truman with Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948. Praise and accolades followed throughout the ’50s. ibid. caption
Primarily, I am a city fellow. I like pavement, the sound of my shoes on pavement, stuffed windows, all-night restaurants, sirens in the night, sinister but alive. ibid. Capote
‘You don’t write for history; you write to express yourself.’ ibid. Williams
Tennessee Williams died in 1983 at the age of 71 due to an overdose of barbiturates; Truman Capote died 18 months later at the age of 59 from complications of alcoholism. They both suffered from depression and addiction. ibid. caption
What [Agatha] Christie’s books also reflect, though, is the Christian principles that she had learned as a girl in the last years of the nineteenth century. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You III: Modern Victorians, BBC 2015