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#1. “I call you precious being precious myself”: Raymond Chandler
Tom Williams is the author of A Mysterious Something In The Light: A Life of Raymond Chandler. Here he speculates on five things that the curiously contradictory author of The Big Sleep might have...
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#2. “Gold in them dirty sheets”: Ernest Hemingway
Paul Hendrickson is the author of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 – 1961. He takes on the formidable task of identifying five things Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) might...
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#3. “Every inch a painter”: Paul Cézanne
Alex Danchev is the author of Cézanne: A Life. He selects five things that the man known variously as ‘the father of modern art’ and ‘a drunken cess-pit emptier’ might have enjoyed in the year in which...
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#4. “She who is to come”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cynthia J. Davis is the author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. An international celebrity in her time, Gilman (1860-1935) was an important figure in the US Woman’s Movement, and she is...
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#5. “I’m the futurity man”: HG Wells
Michael Sherborne is the author of H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life. Once arguably the most famous author in the world, how would Wells, a notorious ladies man, have fared in our age of extreme press...
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#6. “No room for the present”: Evelyn Waugh (Part One)
Selina Hastings is the author of Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Known for his quick wit (and short temper), Waugh wrote some of the twentieth century’s finest novels, but famously held many of the era’s...
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#7. “A common experience”: Evelyn Waugh (Part Two)
Michael Barber is the author of Evelyn Waugh. Where Selina Hastings swum bravely against the tide by listing aspects of modern life Waugh might have liked, Michael indulges Waugh’s well-documented...
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#8. “All adults have secrets”: Patricia Highsmith
Joan Schenkar is the author of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith (1921-1995), whose personal interest in the perverse (referred to as her...
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#9. “On this miserable paper”: Franz Kafka
Nicholas Murray is the author of Kafka. Now recognised as one of the twentieth-century’s most influential writers, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) had a lifestyle remarkable in its outer appearance chiefly for...
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#10. ‘Diligence makes genius’: Nikolaus Pevsner
Susie Harries is the author of Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life. Pevsner (1902–1983) arrived in Britain from Germany an unknown architectural historian in 1933. By 1969 he would be knighted, his reputation...
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#11. “Domestic interest”: Agatha Christie
Laura Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Christie (1890–1976) doesn’t belong in the twenty-first century, inseparable as she is from an inter-war ‘Golden Age’ of crime...
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#12. “No use being sentimental”: August Strindberg
Sue Prideaux is the author of Strindberg: A Life. Novelist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist and hellraiser, Strindberg (1849–1912) is principally known, in Arthur Miller’s words, as ‘the mad...
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#13. “Abominable fancies”: Robert Louis Stevenson
Claire Harman is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. Best remembered today for his enduring literary creations like Mr Hyde and Long John Silver, the uncommonly quotable Stevenson...
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#14. “Oh god! Make the devil keep his promise!”: Charles Baudelaire
Rosemary Lloyd is the author of Baudelaire’s World and Charles Baudelaire. As the original flâneur and (perhaps) father of modern poetry, Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–1867) passion for describing the...
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#15. “One crack – and it falls through!”: Tennessee Williams
John S. Bak is the author of Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life. One of the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed American playwrights, with a penchant for writing faded beauty and cracked heroines,...
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#16. “Designs and estimates”: John Soane
Gillian Darley is the author of John Soane: An Accidental Romantic. By far the oldest speculative subject on The Fertile Fact thus far, Soane (1753 – 1837) was an eminent Georgian architect, collector...
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#17. “Nothing in this world is hidden forever”: Wilkie Collins
Andrew Lycett is the author of Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. As author of The Moonstone, The Woman in White and the underrated page-turner No Name, Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was a crime...
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#18. “Stranger than dreams and far more disordered”: Nancy Mitford
Lyndsy Spence is the author of The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life. Nancy (1904–1973) was the most famous of the Mitford sisters, whose inter-war ‘foolishness’ brought with it a degree of upper class...
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#19. “Giving all to the present”: Albert Camus
Robert Zaretsky is the author of A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Existential philosopher, embracer of the absurd and humanist novelist, Albert Camus (1913–1960) once...
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