Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).
The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”
P. L. Travers invented Mary Poppins, in a series of books beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934.
The earliest use of flashback in Western literature was in Homer’s Odyssey. Most of Odysseus’s adventures are recounted in a flashback set within a larger narrative frame. Odysseus tells his story at the court of the Phaeacians.
The play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw ends with Eliza Doolittle asserting her humanity and rejecting Henry Higgins. But the 1938 movie ending, approved by Shaw, brought the pair together. The musical version, My Fair Lady (1956), also had a happy ending.
Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) by Oscar Wilde includes the statement “I can resist everything except temptation”.
Will Durant was twelve years older than Ariel Durant. The authors of the multivolume series The Story of Civilization (1935-67) were married in New York City in 1913, when he was twenty-seven and she was fifteen.