Author

Extract

While in India as principal of a government college from 1856-61, he taught himself oriental languages and became immersed in oriental culture...

It was ultimately an ill-fated voyage; the elderly vessel had to be abandoned in the Java Sea when fire broke out in March 1883 before she could reach her destination of Bangkok...

He also produced some now forgotten novels and a history of the stage...

Tuggs, in ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’, considered Gravesend ‘too low for a family holiday’, Dickens was sufficiently impressed with Waites’s Hotel on the waterfront to hold his birthday dinners there for several years...

Freeman was one of the first successful crime writers to use scientific fact as a basis for detection...

Although John Smith’s version of Rebecca Rolfe’s early life has been disputed, especially by those who also objected to the ‘Disneyfication’ of her life in the cartoon film, there is no doubt that on her way back to the Virginian colony she was taken ill with tuberculosis or pneumonia...

His fellow Scandinavian, Hendrik Ibsen, was beginning to acquire a large following in England, but despite the encouragement given by George Bernard Shaw, Strindberg had yet to make a reputation there...