Quite Interesting Things about … authors

Only 11 per cent of professional authors make a living from their writing.

One in ve Britons cannot name a single author of literature.

Aristotle had a lisp.

Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.

James Joyce took 17 years to write

Finnegans Wake.

Rudyard Kipling painted his golf balls red so he could play in the snow.

Flaubert lived with his mother until he was 51.

Daniel Defoe began his rst novel, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, aged 60.

Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight.

J M Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was under ve feet tall and didn’t shave till he was 24. When Roald Dahl was six, his mother took him to meet Beatrix Potter. She didn’t like children and told them both to ‘buzz o ’.

George Orwell had his knuckles tattooed as a policeman in Burma, and later ran the village shop in Wallington, Hertfordshire. Nostradamus published a book of love potions and jam recipes.

Alexandre Dumas fought his rst duel at 23. In the course of it, his trousers fell down.

Jorge Luis Borges never produced a work of ction longer than 19 pages. He called writing long books ‘a laborious madness’.

Miguel de Cervantes was captured by pirates and held as a slave in Algiers for ve years.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lived next door to Mark Twain.

Mark Twain de ned an ideal library as one with no Jane Austen books in it.

Arnold Bennett died of typhoid contracted from water he drank in Paris to prove it was perfectly safe. When staying in hotels, Hans Christian Andersen always carried a coil of rope in case he needed to escape from a re.

JOHN LLOYD

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