Literary Trivia

Did you know that Gulliver's Travels author Jonathan Swift refused to talk to anyone for an entire year? That Voltaire got rid of boring guests by pretending to faint? That Balzac's hobby was hypnotism?A collection of over 300 lists - everything you could possibly ask about famous books and writers - is here: authors who wrote standing up, famous last words, writers who couldn't spell, unusual work habits, sexual peccadilloes, unintended double entendres in the classics, bad reviews of future classics, and even writers who were spies.Find out about the weird and wonderful behaviour of all these wordsmiths such as the poet who, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, kept a bear in his rooms because there was a rule against keeping dogs or cats, or the poet who tied a cat to a kite during a thunderstorm in the hope of seeing it electrocuted.