Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 36

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... that Anna Akhmatova (Russian: А́нна Ахма́това, pictured) was an eminent Russian Acmeist poet whose works were banned from publication during Stalin's dictatorship?

... that Le Malade imaginaire, first performed in 1673, is Molière's final play?

... that "Don't Let's Be Beastly To The Germans" is a song by Noel Coward written and released during the Second World War as part of his contribution to the war effort?

... that Ivan Cankar is considered the most famous Slovenian writer, and that his 1904 novel Hiša Marije Pomočnice (The Ward of Our Lady of Mercy) is about a group of terminally ill girls awaiting their deaths in a hospital in fin de siècle Vienna?

... that Jeff Abbott, John le Carré, Manning Coles, James Munro, and Daniel Silva are authors of spy fiction?

... that the Goethe-Institut, founded in 1925 to promote German language and culture outside of the German-speaking countries, is named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?

... that, as one critic put it, "some of the descriptions of the sex scenes" in Ben Elton's Past Mortem "might prove a bit much for the faint-hearted"?