Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 21

... that Murder in the Cathedral is a poetic drama by T. S. Eliot that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral (pictured) in 1170?

... that literary historian Ian Ousby called Helen Zahavi's 1991 novel Dirty Weekend "the serial-killer novel to end all serial-killer novels"?

... that Theophrastus (Θεόφραστος), a native of Lesbos (Λέσβος), wrote Χαρακτήρες (The Characters), which consists of brief, vigorous and trenchant delineations of moral types which form the first recorded attempt at systematic character writing?

... that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car is a children's novel written by Ian Fleming for his son Caspar?

... that Pension Schöller is an 1890 German farce by Wilhelm Jacoby and Carl Laufs about a Berlin boarding house mistaken for a lunatic asylum, and that one of the eccentric boarders, a young man who wants to be an actor, has difficulty pronouncing the letter l ("Nacht muß es sein, wo Friednands Sterne strahnen! Wannenstein!")?

... that Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the eponymous hero of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel Идиот (The Idiot), is an epileptic?

... that Emil Jannings, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Laurence Fishburne, and Eamonn Walker have all portrayed Shakespeare's Othello in film?