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...English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs, were...

...English inn, such as I did not so nearly realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there was an admirable image of a fire in the grate,...

...English summer has suffered often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise to those coquetries with October known to our own summer....

...What does our interest in writers' belongings, manuscripts or other artefacts say about us? In this short film, Nicola Watson, Professor of English Literature at The Open University, gives a brief summary of some of the popular artefacts that people have visited at writers' houses since the phenomenon began... The Secret Life of Books - Find out more about the series....

...English Bards and Scotch Reviewers anonymously – to which many of my critics took offense. Following this, I took a tour to the Mediterranean and upon returning to England, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was published in 1812. A wondrous event occurred – it sold out in three days and ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’! (Letters and Journals of Lord Byron,...