Remembering C. S. Lewis on his birthday. Did you know ….. Lewis destroyed the first version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when his friends criticized it; he then rewrote it from scratch. Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis' memoir Surprised by Joy, he was baptized in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Clive Staples Lewis was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lec...
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William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". The exact date of his birth is not recorded, but it is most often celebrated around the world on 23 April. Shakespeare’s baptism is recorded in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. Baptisms typically took place within three days of a new arrival, Did you know: Shakespeare left his wife his “second best best” ……….On his death, Shakespeare made several gifts to various people but left his property to his daughter, Susanna. The only mention of his wife in Shakespeare’s own will is: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture”. The “furniture” was the bedclothes for the bed. Shakespeare died on his birthday. ………. William Shakespeare’s burial at Holy Trinity Church in Str...
Kafka’s tale of a man who wakes to find he has changed into a giant insect still has the power to shock and delight a century after it was first published. Many regard it as the greatest short story in all literary fiction. Metamorphosis exemplifies the world Kafka invented on paper – recognizable but not quite real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike. This world is now called “Kafkaesque”, to denote a sense of suddenly inhabiting a world in which one’s customary habits of thought and behavior are confounded and made hopeless. [A bit like our current situation of Covid] A German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absu...
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