Curiosities Of Literature

Description

One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia.
Which author had the heaviest brain? Whose manuscript was inadvertently used to light a fire? What was the original title of 1984? This is the ideal anthology of useless information for all literary devotees.

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One of our foremost critics tours some of the more arcane byways of literature

Author description

John Sutherland has been a professor of literature for a long time and in many places. Currently he teaches untechnologically at the California Institute of Technology and is the emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor at UCL. He is the author of numerous books, including the puzzle-collection Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (probably, yes) and the encyclopaedic Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (soon to be reissued in a yet more encyclopaedic form). In recent years, he has written voluminously on a variety of literary and non literary topics in, principally, the Guardian and the Financial Times. His interest in literature has become more curious over the years. Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and many other publications. His books include a novel, Snatches; a memoir, Stuff; The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to Be Human; and comic book versions of T.S.Eliot's 'The Waste Land' and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. He smokes and qualifies as the sharpest literary-pictorial satirist of his time.