Tom Sharpe was an English satirical author, born in London and educated at Lancing College and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Wilt on High is the third outing for Henry Wilt, bilious lecturer and Head of Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology. Same struggles, same problems… But the even tenor of his days is rudely interrupted when the shadow of drug dealing flickers acro... Read More
Tom Sharpe, who has died aged 85, did not start writing comic novels until 1971 when he was 43, but once he got going he gained a large readership. Wilt in Nowhere is the fourth in the series of novels about hapless polytechnic lecturer Henry Wilt, his wife Eva, and their incorrigible four little girls, now aged 14, at convent school and bubbling over with an unhealthy interest in all things se... Read More
Tom Sharpe was an English bestselling novelist whose savagely satirical black comedies attacked the injustice of apartheid and the absurdities of academic life. Sharpe was educated at Bloxham School. He then was accepted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history and social anthropology. In 1951, Tom Sharpe moved to South Africa, where he worked as a social worker and a teacher, befo... Read More
An English art historian, novelist and journalist Iain George Pears was born on 8 August 1955 in Coventry, England. He was educated at Warwick School, an all-boys public school in Warwick, and studied at Wadham College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 and ZDF in Germany. Pears first came to international prominence with his best selling book An Instance of... Read More
Jostein Gaarder is a Norwegian school teacher and author of books that examined the history of philosophy and religion for an audience of young readers. Gaarder studied the history of ideas, religion, and Nordic literature at the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1976, he worked as a secondary-school teacher of philosophy, religion, and literature in Oslo and Bergen. He began his literary... Read More
William Wilkie Collins was one of the best known, best loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers. He was a close friend of Charles Dickens from their meeting in March 1851 until Dickens' death in June 1870. Wilkie Collins is best known for The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone. The last has been called the first modern English detective novel. Collins's wo... Read More
An English novelist, playwright, and short story writer William Wilkie Collins was born at 11 New Cavendish Street, Marylebone, London, the son of a well-known Royal Academician landscape painter, William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes. A skilful manipulator of intricate plots, Collins is remembered as a principal founder of English detective fiction. His novels of intrigue and suspense,... Read More
Helen Fielding is the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries. She also won British Book of the Year award for Bridget Jones’s Diary. She received her early education from Wakefield Girls High School and then she went on to major in English from St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Moreover, she performed... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. He was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. His mother was Evelyn, and his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. As an infant, he briefly lived, with his fami... Read More
Ian Fleming, in full Ian Lancaster Fleming, was a suspense-fiction novelist whose character James Bond, the stylish, high-living British secret service agent 007, who became one of the most successful and widely imitated heroes of 20th-century popular fiction. The son of a Conservative MP and the grandson of a Scottish banker, Fleming was born into a family of wealth and privilege. He was educa... Read More
There's nothing like a good spy thriller to get your imagination running wild. And perhaps no one was better able to give his readers such a trip as the legendary Ian Fleming. Indeed, the titular hero of his James Bond series of books started out as an intentionally flat character, someone onto whom readers could project a more complex identity. Fleming said of his work, "while thrillers may no... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. Born on May 28, 1908, Ian Fleming would go on to create the most enduring literary figure since Sherlock Holmes. Rare book collectors are fascinated with the legacy of Ian Fleming and James Bond. Ian Fleming named James Bond after an ornithologist because it was the ‘dullest name’ he’d ever heard. The origin... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. William Cook in the New Statesman considered James Bond to be "the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel H. C. McNeile and the Richard... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. In 1914 Fleming attended Durnford School, a preparatory school on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. He did not enjoy his time at Durnford; he suffered unpalatable food, physical hardship and bullying. In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intellig... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. He was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. His mother was Evelyn, and his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming is a novel centred around the infamous British MI5 spy, James Bond... Read More
Moonraker is the third novel by Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. According to the author Raymond Benson, Moonraker is a deeper and more introspective book than Fleming's previous work, which allows the author to develop the characters further. In Moonraker, Millionaire Hugo Drax cheats at cards, the highest offence in polite English society. Special... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond novels. The Bond books were written in post-war Britain when the country was still an imperial power. As the series progressed, the British Empire was in decline; journalist William Cook observed that "Bond pandered to Britain's inflated and increasingly insecure self-imag... Read More
Casino Royale is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors. The first US edition of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale was published with the title ‘You Asked for It’; it took a few... Read More
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He was born on 20 April 1953 and was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Sebastian Faulks was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. In 1989 he published The Girl at the Lion d'Or, th... Read More
Alistair Stuart MacLean was a Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. He was born in Glasgow but spent much of his childhood and youth in Daviot, ten miles south of Inverness. While a university student, MacLean began writing short stories for extra income, winning a competition in 1954 with the maritime story "Dileas". The publishing company Collins asked him for a... Read More