Search results for ""author patrick donovan""

During his 1920s heyday, Arnold Bennett was one of Britain’s most celebrated writers. As the author of The Old Wives’ Tale and Clayhanger he was a household name, writing just as much for the common man as London’s literati. His face was plastered over theatre hoardings and the sides of West End omnibuses. His life represents the ultimate rags-to-riches story of a man who ‘banged on the door of Fortune like a weekly debt collector’ as one of his obituaries so vividly put it. Yet for all his success, few were aware how cursed Bennett felt by his life-long stutter and other debilitating character traits. In the years running up to his death in 1931, his affairs were close to collapse as he fought a losing battle on three fronts: with his estranged wife; with his disenchanted mistress; and from a literary perspective with Virginia Woolf. As the first full length biography of Bennett since 1974, the work draws on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters to shed new light on a personality who can be considered a ‘Lost Icon’ of early Twentieth Century Britain.

Read more less

The Morrin Centre in Quebec City, built on the site of military barracks known as the Royal Redoubt, served first as a “common gaol” (public prison), then as the Morrin College, the first English-language institute of higher education in the city, and has been home to the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec for many years. The Society has hosted in its astonishing library such illustrious figures as Charles Dickens and Emmelyne Pankhurst. With incredible anecdotes, the authors guide us through the building’s two-century history and its place in the history of Quebec City, Quebec, and Canada.

Read more less