Amazing but true, the original of Dickens' haunting character Miss Havisham in Great Expectation... Miss Havisham was here...

Amazing but true, the original of Dickens' haunting character Miss Havisham in Great Expectations had a connection with India, lived here for a while in fact, as we discover from Angus Calder's Gods Mongrels and Demons — 101 Brief But Essential Lives.

Dickens has sometimes been dismissed as an ‘entertainer', but I think most readers would agree that the characters he creates never leave one's consciousness, perhaps because so many seem larger than life.

First published by Bloosmbury in 2003, the paperback edition of Gods... has just been sent to me by a friend. The entries are testimony of Calder's lively and wide-ranging mind. A Cambridge-educated academic based in Edinburgh, he has written poetry, history, literary criticism, and edited anthologies. He was connected with the Open University in Britain, and has taught in Africa.

The Japanese poet Basho is here, the blues singer Billie Holiday, the baseball star Babe Ruth, the Yoruba god Ogun, and numerous other names well-known and not so well known. An excellent bedside book.

This is cache, read story here