Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert’s most famous novel, Madame Bovary has become a world classic, and its protagonist, Emma Bovary, is as readily identifiable as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

He also wrote historical fiction as well as dramatic poetry and produced a satirical dictionary.

Hazlitt and Stendahl

Stendhal and William Hazlitt were influential writers of the early nineteenth century. Hazlitt, an essayist, critic and philosopher, is little read today but is remembered for a sex scandal he helped inflame.

Stendhal is best remembered for two novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Both writers contributed to the intellectual culture of the Romantic movement.

W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden was an academic, essayist, dramatist and poet. Born in England 1907, he moved to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946.

Auden is best known for his poetry, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1947 poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, a title which came to characterise the modern era.

Raymond Chandler

Turning to writing after losing his job during the Great Depression, Rayond Chandler would become one of the best-known voices of hardboiled detective fiction.

Working as a novelist, short story writer and screen writer, Raymond Chandler would create one of the most iconic characters of the hardboiled detective genre, and set a standard that no other writer in the genre has equalled.

George Orwell

His very name has become a term that describes oppression and state surveillance: ‘Orwellian’. George Orwell satirised the Soviet State in his two most famous novels, Nineteen-Eighty Four and Animal Farm. But are these two books all there is to know about this author? Michael Duffy delves deeper in a personal interview at the writer's residence.

Gertrude Stein

American born Gertrude Stein moved to Paris in 1903 with her brother Leo. In Paris they became early patrons and advocates for new art styles of the time, and associated with now-famous painters like Matisse and Picasso, and writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Stein’s writing was experimental, some think difficult. She gained popularity in the 1930s with her autobiographical work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and subsequently returned to America to do a lecture tour and promote her writing.

Vladmimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was an expatriate Russian writer whose family fled Russia after the Bolsheviks gained control in 1917. For the rest of his life he would live in England, Germany and America, and would then finally settle in Switzerland.

Writing novels first in Russian and later in English, he was to produce one of the 20^th Century’s greatest and most controversial novels, Lolita, and one of the literature’s greatest monsters, Humbert Humbert, a paedophile.