My favourite walk in Oxford during lockdown oxfordmail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from oxfordmail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The 1970 film adaptation of Norton Juster s novel The Phantom Tollbooth
Credit: MGM
How sad to learn that Norton Juster, one of those writers made world-famous by a single book, died on Tuesday. He was 91 and would soon have been celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of the novel forever associated with his name, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was launched in 1961 and has remained in print ever since.
It tells the story of an amiable American boy named Milo, 10 years old and bored with everything. He is puzzled when a strange parcel arrives in his bedroom, containing a model tollbooth through which he can drive his toy car. So he does – onto roads that lead into the Lands Beyond, peopled with curious creatures, kindly or menacing. The book appeared 100 years after the pioneering work in its genre, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was conceived by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford don with a passion for puzzles, conjuring tricks, verses and limericks. Alice launched a new
Learn the full story behind these age-old rumours.
SHAKESPEARE DIDN’T WRITE HIS OWN PLAYS No individual has had a more pronounced effect upon English language and culture than William Shakespeare. This isn’t an opinion; it’s an objective fact: the guy single-handedly invented around 1700 words, from ‘arouse’ to ‘bedroom’, ‘dawn’, ‘jaded’, ‘skim milk’ and ‘scuffle’. Yet, for all of that, surprisingly little is known about his life. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, married a woman named Anne Hathaway and died in 1616, having penned some 38 plays in the interim. To certain Shakespearean scholars, this dearth of biographical information is fishy – it’s made them question whether Shakespeare actually wrote the plays now credited to him. Instead, they argue, he was a convenient cover for either Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, or the playwright Christopher Marlowe, about whose life rather more is known. Confusingly, Marlowe was killed
Timothy Larsen on the Victorian writer
Once upon a time, when young princesses were still plentiful, there nevertheless was a scarcity of children’s literature throughout the kingdom. The Scottish author George MacDonald (1824-1905) recalled of his own childhood: “We had very few books for children in those days.” There were multiple reasons for this famine of words of wonder. At the most practical level, a whole series of technological innovations and trade and business developments would allow the Victorian world of MacDonald’s adulthood to be awash in affordable printed material beyond what previous generations ever could have imagined. Moreover, in the early nineteenth century, many adults were illiterate, and many families that were literate owned only a handful of books, with by the far the most common ones all being religious texts, most notably the Bible, prayer books, hymn books, Bunyan’s