English language Category
Charlotte Brontë
While Irish priest Patrick Brunty (later Brontë, 1777-1861) lived to age 84, neither his wife nor any…
Arthur Ransome
‘Swallows and Amazons’ (1930) was a groundbreaking children’s novel written by an extraordinary Yorkshireman, Arthur Ransome (1884-1967).…
Children’s singing and chanting games
Peter Opie (1918-82) and his wife Iona (1923-2017) were pioneers of research into and cataloguing of children’s…
Malapropisms and Spoonerisms
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) had Irish lineage and was an MP at Westminster for 32 years, lending…
Roget’s Thesaurus
Stuck for a word? Since 1852 we have been turning to the amazing lexicon (“dictionary, vocabulary, index,…
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’
Being the first English-language novel written specially for children, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) has afforded researchers plenty…
Penguin paperbacks
Bristol-born Sir Allen Lane (1902-70) was the genius with the driving force to create a revolution in…
Michael Bond, creator of ‘Paddington Bear’
The children’s stories about the accident-prone bear called Paddington, were written by Berkshire-born Michael Bond, CBE (1926-2017).…
The versatile ‘ou’
A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken sounds that together make up words (there are 44…
Dylan Thomas
The most famous Welsh poet is surely Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-53), whose most prolific period came in…
Alan Bennett
Author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett (1934-), a Yorkshireman, began writing in 1960, when he was a…
Roald Dahl Day
Roald Dahl (1916-90) was born in Cardiff to Norwegian parents and Roald Dahl Day is on his…