Kenneth Grahame was born on 8th March 1859 in Edinburgh.At age 5 his mother succumbed to puerperal fever. His father, who had a drinking problem, now sent his 4 children to live with their grandmother at her large house in Cookham, Berkshire. Here the children lived in large open grounds next to the river. These early experiences would in later years, be retold in his writing through a myriad of characters.Grahame loved being a pupil at St Edward's School, Oxford and wanted...

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 detective writer Headon Hill.

Kenneth Grahame was born on 8th March 1859 in Edinburgh.At age 5 his mother succumbed to puerperal fever. His father, who had a drinking problem, now sent his 4 children to live with their grandmother at her large house in Cookham, Berkshire. Here the children lived in large open grounds next to the river. These early experiences would in later years, be retold in his writing through a myriad of characters.Grahame loved being a pupil at St Edward's School, Oxford and wanted...

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...

Margaret Gabrielle Vere Campbell was born on the 1st November 1885 on Hayling Island in Hampshire.Her childhood was fraught with problems, her alcoholic father left early in her life and was later found dead on a London Street. Life thereafter was poverty with an uncaring mother.However, her talents took her to the Slade School of Fine Art and later to study in Paris.Her first fiction, written at a mere 16, was a violent medieval historical novel, ‘The Viper of Mila...

Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883 in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family.Life for the young Kafka and his passion for literature was often made an ordeal by his over-bearing and domineering entrepreneur of a father.In 1889 Kafka was sent to the Deutsche Knabenschule, an elementary school in Prague. His father would only allow him to be educated in German-speaking schools and even went so far as to limit visits to the synagogue to ...

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November, 1821 to distinguished multi-ethnic parents from a Lithuanian background.His childhood years were at the family home in hospital grounds which also contained an orphanage, an insane asylum and a cemetery for criminals. The young Fyodor often disobeyed his father by talking to the ill in the hospital gardens.His health was compromised at age 9 when he experienced his first epileptic fit. By the time he was a...

Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883 in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family.Life for the young Kafka and his passion for literature was often made an ordeal by his over-bearing and domineering entrepreneur of a father.In 1889 Kafka was sent to the Deutsche Knabenschule, an elementary school in Prague. His father would only allow him to be educated in German-speaking schools and even went so far as to limit visits to the synagogue to ...

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 Frederick Greenwood.

It was hailed as the answer to the obesity epidemic; a pill that allows you to eat anything you like and still lose weight. Millions were attracted by the promise of a leaner, fitter body, but there was a fatal and unforeseen flaw in this new panacea. A tiny microbe, lurking within, slowly infects the users. In turn they pass the infection to others with a sneeze, a cough or a simple kiss, and before long tens of millions are infected and turned into mindless, shambling wrecks, with the so...

Richard Garnett C.B. was born on the 27th February 1835.Educated in Bloomsbury he then joined the nearby British Museum as an assistant librarian in 1851, shortly after his father’s death.He was continuously promoted to high-ranking positions at the British Library until his retirement in 1899.In his personal life he married Olivia Narney Singleton in 1863 and was the father to six surviving children. Despite the constant call of work and family he found time to tra...

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...