Oscar Wilde was the editor of a women’s fashion magazine

Known for his acerbic wit, the playwright and aesthete had a lesser-known career between 1887 and 1889. Shortly before publishing his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde took over a Victorian magazine called The Lady’s World, which featured on its cover a female figure on a pedestal, holding a book in her left hand while gazing at her own image in a mirror. Renaming it The Woman’s World, the new editor removed the front-page goddess and elevated gossip columns with the feature Wilde’s Literary Notes. While his editorial assistant Arthur Fish revealed that Wilde found the pressures of office work hard, his regular contribution falling off after the fourth issue, he did introduce a format that treated women as equals. In a letter to the publisher outlining his plans, Wilde wrote: “[I]t seems to me that the field of the mundus muliebris, the field of millinery and trimmings, is to some extent already occupied by such papers as the Queen and the Lady’s Pictorial, and that we should take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.”

Samuel Beckett wrote a piece for a Broadway musical

The Dublin-born playwright and novelist − who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing which “in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation” – is not an obvious choice for a Broadway musical. After penning sparse numbers like Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett contributed a piece for Kenneth Tynan’s Oh, Calcutta! – a 1969 avant-garde revue whose revival was one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history. While Beckett later withdrew permission for the use of his sketch, it was used as a prologue in the original staging. Called Breath, and lasting 25 seconds according to the instructions in Beckett’s script, it consists of a birth cry followed by an amplified recording of a long inhalation and exhalation. The artist Damien Hirst filmed a version in 2001, with the actor Keith Allen providing the breath.

Seamus Heaney was scared of frogs

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney – who grew up on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland – betrayed an unusual fear in an interview with Brick Magazine. The land around him featured throughout his work – yet despite admitting he had an Arcadian childhood, there were rural anxieties. “Actually any fear I had was on the whole elemental fear,” Heaney told Brick. “Wordsworth was afraid in the mountains, I was scared by frogs and rats . . . and frogs spawning, which went into my first poem, Death of a Naturalist.” Both the sight and the sound triggered his response: “They were croaking, and it was a very kind of sinister croak, a kind of chorus of croaking, and it just was scaresome to me... the sense of the gross, physical frogginess of them all and the sound they made.”

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