Chinese novelist and dramatist. Born Beijing as Shu Qingchun. Lao She was his pen name. Lectured at what is now SOAS 1924 - 9. During this time he discovered Dickens and began his own writing. Best known for the novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse. A victim of the Cultural Revolution, he committed suicide by drowning in Taiping Lake.
His novel Mr Ma and Son is set in London and draws on his experiences here.
Writer. Born at 66 Braxfield Road, Brockley. His best known work, 'Tarka the Otter' was published in 1927. He attended the Nuremberg rally in Berlin and saw Adolf Hitler as a source of good for his...
Believed to have assisted Fowler in his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The Latin on the memorial, 'castigavit et emendavit', translates as “he corrected and improved“, which is quite an ac...
Novel written by Leonard Woolf, published 1913, based on his experiences as a colonial civil servant in British-controlled Ceylon, but unusually written from the native point of view.
Born in Paris. Adam Thorpe has written "Conscious of her physical plainness but 'irresistibly seductive' in conversation, her salons were the focal point for pre-revolutionary reform, and eventual...
Novelist and short story writer. Born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson,Chelsea. Most of her childhood was spent with her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, the town upon which she based Cranford in the novel...
