Scylla, a female six-headed monster, captured sailors and ate them. Charybdis was a whirlpool (or a creator of whirlpools) that swallowed ships.
The two creatures lay in wait on either side of the Straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily.
Their story is told in Homer’s Odyssey (ninth century B.C.).
In the 1970s, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) Julian Barnes wrote the “Edward Pygge” gossip column for the British periodical, The New Review.
Virginia Woolf’s maiden name was Adeline Virginia Stephen. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912.
The young man Goethe is the protagonist of two novels, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96) and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, or The Renunciants (1829).
Shortly after the turn of the century, President Theodore Roosevelt said that the writers of exposes who flourished at the time reminded him of John Bunyan’s Man with the Muckrake. The Man with the Muckrake when offered a heavenly crown, “would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake…
“II Penseroso,” written in 1632 is Milton’s companion work to “L’Allegro”.
Sir Edward Dyer said, “My mind to me a kingdom is” in his 1588 poem of the same name.