1) Not only had Hugh Jackman not read the X-Men comics before Wolverine, he reportedly didn’t even know wolverines existed

2) Ella Bruccoleri thought Austen was “posh” before landing The Other Bennett Sister

3) Billy Burke had no idea about Twilight before he accepted the role of Charlie Swan

4) Viggo Mortensen only accepted the role of Aragorn because his son was a Lord of the Rings super-fan

5) If you think that’s bad, Elijah Wood only started the Lord of the Rings books this year

6) Ewan McGregor never read Jane Austen’s Emma before playing Frank Churchill

7) Maisie Williams wasn’t deemed old enough to read Game of Thrones when she joined the HBO show (which is fair enough, really)

8) Rebecca Ferguson didn’t finish Dune before playing Lady Jessica

From the Brontës’ Haworth to Jane Austen’s Bath, Wordsworth’s Lake District and Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, literary places continue to exert a powerful hold over readers.

Literary tourism appears to be enjoying renewed popularity, from visits inspired by classic novels to the TikTok trend of turning books into travel itineraries. But what exactly are literary tourists hoping to find when they get there? The answer is more complicated than it might seem.

Haworth, Bath and Dorset all exist, obviously. They can be found on a map and visited. But the Brontë moors, Austen’s Bath, Wordsworth’s Lakes and Hardy’s Wessex are also literary reimaginings of those places. They may never have existed in quite the form readers imagine.

Our fascination with literary places has a long history. Literary geography, which combines physical geography with literary studies, emerged in the late 19th century as the novel grew in popularity and, in many ways, grew alongside literary tourism.

In 1899, William Lyon Phelps created his Literary Map of England, marking locations associated with authors and literary works. A few years later, William Sharp’s Literary Geography (1904) mapped regions such as “Dickens land”, “the Brontë country” and the literary geography of the English lakes.

These early literary maps invited readers to see where fictional and geographical worlds appeared to overlap. More than a century later, readers are still seeking those points of intersection.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex offers a notable example. Hardy borrowed and invented place names to create a fictional territory mapped onto the geography of southern England. Readers soon came to regard this invented landscape as real. Guides to its literary landmarks even appeared during his lifetime, prompting Hardy to worry that readers were taking his landscape too literally.

Wessex was, in Hardy’s words, a “partly real, partly dream” country: an amalgamation of imagined and real-world geography. That dream country continues to attract visitors. In 2025, a Guardian article described a walking pilgrimage through Hardy’s Dorset in search of the landscapes associated with his fiction.

The novelist V.S. Naipaul offers an insight into why literary places can become so powerful. Reflecting on reading Dickens as a child in Trinidad, Naipaul wrote of how Dickens created “a city of fantasy” that readers could reconstruct using what they already knew to imagine what they did not.

What’s remarkable about Naipaul’s observation is that it turns conventional assumptions about realism upside down. Dickens’s achievement was not simply that he described London accurately. His language was open enough to allow readers to create their own version of the city.

The London in a reader’s head could therefore become as vivid as the one on a map.

Real versus imagined

When visitors reach Haworth, Grasmere or Dorset, they are not encountering those places for the first time. They have already visited them in their imagination. Their version of the landscape has been assembled from books, films, photographs, places they have visited and other cultural references. When they arrive, they compare the physical location with that imagined one.

The feeling that emerges from this comparison might be described as “anemoia”, a term coined by writer John Koenig to describe “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”. Naipaul’s account of reading Dickens suggests a spatial equivalent: a longing for a place never personally experienced.

Literary tourism is one expression of this process. Readers do not simply consume literary landscapes but participate in creating them in their imagination. This may be particularly true of 19th-century realism. Realist writers sought to represent the social and geographical world around them, but their novels still depended on selection, omission and invention.

Do museums blur fact and fiction?

Many of the most popular literary destinations are writers’ houses. They promise access to authors and to the origins of literary works: the room where a novel was written, the house where a writer lived or the landscape believed to have inspired it.

In this sense, literary pilgrimage attempts to anchor literature in geography. Yet these sites rarely draw a clear line between life and art. Instead, they often weave biography and fiction together. At Haworth, visitors move through domestic spaces associated with the Brontë family while simultaneously encountering the imaginative worlds of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The Brontë Parsonage museum in Haworth derives much of its power from bringing biography, landscape, family tragedy and fiction together in one place. Jane Austen’s house at Chawton makes a similar move. Its director has described how visitors seek intimacy with Austen through the house and hope to enter the world of her novels.

Some literary sites go further by giving geographical form to places that never existed at all. Sherlock Holmes’s famous address, 221B Baker Street, appears not to have corresponded to a real house when Arthur Conan Doyle began writing the Holmes stories. Indeed, the address itself was impossible within the street numbering system of the time.

Today, however, visitors can tour the Sherlock Holmes Museum – located at a now very real 221B Baker Street – as though Holmes really lived there. An imaginary location has become a geographical destination.

From the earliest maps of Dickens land and Brontë country to today’s literary pilgrimages, the goal has remained remarkably consistent: to find the point at which real and fictional worlds collide. Literary geography suggests that this point may never quite be reachable. Perhaps that is precisely why readers keep looking for it.

An Oldham man has shared why he has been involved in helping Coronation Street with its latest hard-hitting health storyline in which Kit Green has been seen being given a breast cancer diagnosis.

As viewers of the ITV soap, which is filmed in Salford, know, the diagnosis comes on the back of the death of Kit’s great-aunt, Celeste. Before she died, she made Kit’s half-sister, Gemma Winter-Brown, aware that the family may carry the familial BRCA gene.

Carrying a familial BRCA (Breast Cancer) gene mutation means inheriting a harmful change in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes from a parent, which significantly raises your lifetime risk of developing certain cancers.

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But as their mum, Bernie Winter-Alahan, and Gemma face testing, unbeknownst to them, Kit has already been seeking medical help due to concerns about his own health and was recently diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, something almost 500 men in the UK face every year.

The Coronation Street production team are working closely with Macmillan Cancer Support and Breast Cancer Now to accurately portray Kit’s cancer while raising awareness of the very real risks of the illness amongst men.

Although male breast cancer is real, it is rare, and as it accounts for less than one per cent of all breast cancer cases, many men do not realise they can get it, which leads to embarrassment, delayed diagnoses, and higher mortality rates.

David is among those men who have received their own diagnosis. He was 62 when he was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in 2019.

He explains: “I went to the doctor at first about the fatty breast issue, medically known as gynecomastia, but was told, ‘It’ll never come to anything’. Then I had an inverted nipple, so I went back to the GP and got a referral for a biopsy and tests. I was diagnosed with an invasive ductal carcinoma grade 3.

“I had a mastectomy and then axillary clearance, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. My first thought was how was I going to tell my wife and my sons.” David adds: “In 2022, I had a repair to my original mastectomy site, and a risk-reducing mastectomy to the other side as I tested positive for BRCA 2.”

According to Macmillan, the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes usually protect us from cancer. A variant in either of these genes reduces the level of protection. Over time, this may mean some types of cancer are more likely to develop. For men, and people assigned male at birth, who have a BRCA2 gene variant, they have a higher risk of developing prostate, breast and pancreatic cancer.

The cancer spread to David’s lungs in 2023, so it is now classed as stage 4 breast cancer. The cancer is treatable but incurable. “I’ve been told treatment is available until it either doesn’t work, or my body can’t take it or the side effects,” he says. “The purpose of these meds is to prolong life and sadly not cure. Cancer will eventually overcome the meds and build a resistance and sadly return. Until then, we fight on.”

Following his diagnosis, David has received support from Macmillan through welfare advice and grants, specialist nurses, the Support Line, community forum and the local Macmillan support service in Oldham.

“With Macmillan, it felt like someone was fighting my corner, particularly after I was made redundant and I felt like I was a man with breast cancer in a world where no one wants me,” David shares. “My specialist breast cancer nurse at The Christie gave me permission to be myself. I don’t have to hide anything or pretend nothing’s bothering me. You become yourself, and that’s all because she allows you to do that.”

Now, David is using his own experience to help others. “I’m a cancer champion for an organisation in Manchester which targets harder to reach groups that don’t attend screening programmes,” he explains. “There’s no screening programme for men. I say to the ladies, please go along, it might be uncomfortable, but it’s a few minutes, and then you could be told you have it, or thank God you haven’t. But by raising awareness to women, off the back of that, they can remind men to do the same thing and check [their] breast tissue.”

He adds: “People often don’t realise that the [Macmillan] helpline is there and the forums, because if you don’t have cancer, why would you look for these things? I used Macmillan forums a lot when I was first diagnosed and used to call the support line a lot to get support on side effects.

“They have always given me the right advice at the right time and been a lifeline. Macmillan is amazing at signposting, which shows they are supporting the person affected by cancer and have their best interests at heart.”

It has led David to work with the Corrie cast recently on Kit’s male breast cancer storyline. “I am involved in some exciting social media activity as part of the Macmillan partnership with Coronation Street,” he shares. “I am pleased that Coronation Street are running this storyline because it increases the awareness about breast cancer in men and highlights that men can and do get this cancer.

“I know myself, seven years on from my primary diagnosis, that there are still men who don’t realise that men can get breast cancer. Those people see the illness as a female condition and don’t equate that while men don’t have a lot of breast tissue, there’s enough to develop breast cancers and it can run in families. Men might be more likely to have more awareness if family members have had or died through having certain cancers.”

He adds: “Talking about these things saves lives and this story being on prime-time TV will absolutely help people. Even if it’s a female telling her spouse, brother, or father, ‘I told you men can get it!’”

Diversions will be put in place

A road will completely close for a month as part of the Black Cat roundabout roadworks. Roadworks are ongoing on the A428 Black Cat roundabout to transform it into a three-tier grade separated junction.

As a result, multiple road closures have been put in place while the work has been going on. The latest road closure will be on Barford Road in Little Barford between Friday, September 25 and Monday, October 19.

National Highways will be carrying out the works. In a letter to Abbotsley Parish Council, a National Highways spokesperson said: “Barford Road, Little Barford, will be closed from 9pm on Friday, September 25 until 6am on Monday, October 19 2026.

“This closure is needed so we can carry out drainage works and final tie-in works for the new alignment safely. The road will be closed 24 hours a day for the duration of these works. Access for residents within the closure area will be maintained. Please be advised, there will be no through route between St Neots and Tempsford via Barford Road, Little Barford Road during this period.”

During the works, National Highways will remove the existing road surface, install deep drainage, kerbs and the road base, build a new access to residential properties, and complete the final surfacing and white lining.

National Highways added: “We will make every effort to complete these works as quickly as possible, however, please note that all dates are subject to change due to weather conditions and operational requirements. We appreciate that this may cause some inconvenience and thank you in advance for your patience and understanding while we carry out these essential works.”

Diversion routes will be in place during the roadworks:

• From A1 northbound: Traffic will continue on the northbound and join the A428 eastbound at Wyboston. Traffic will continue eastbound along the A428;
• From A428 westbound: Traffic will continue heading west along the A428 before heading south on the A1. Traffic can then leave the A1 at Tempsford.

Haxby Town Council published a guide with a reminder to residents on its website on Monday, September 14 with a distinction given between anti-social behaviour and criminal offences.

A council spokesperson said it is working actively with North Yorkshire Police, ward councillors, the deputy mayor for policing, fire and crime for York and North Yorkshire, and the MP for York Outer Luke Charters to reduce incidences of crime and anti-social behaviour.

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Back in the Autumn last year Luke Charters was in Haxby filming a piece for Channel 4 about anti-social behaviour on the high street.

Mr Charters said at the time he’d been working hard to tackle the issue over the past year alongside Deputy Mayor Jo Coles and had been filming for a piece that aired on The Political Slot on Channel 4.

In May 2025, North Yorkshire Police identified Ethel Ward Playing Field in Haxby as one of the county’s anti-social behaviour hotspots but at the time said targeted enforcement had helped cut incidents significantly.

In a statement, a Haxby Town Council spokesperson said: “We receive police ASB reports every month and discuss these at every meeting.

“Recently, the local police and PCSO attended one of our meetings and it is clear that there has been a spike in ASB nationally – and Haxby is not immune to this.

“However, we were pleased to hear that North Yorkshire Police are expecting an increase in newly-trained and recruited police officers, which should improve police presence and availability.”

The council said its website advice is essentially provided as guidance for which incidents should be reported to 101, or in emergencies to make a 999 call.

The spokesperson added: “If incidents are not properly reported then we cannot expect a police response.

“We actively encourage our residents to continue to report ASB incidents as this enables more police presence in the area. 

“Posting on social media and comments on press articles will not be captured by the police so residents need to ensure they report through the official channels to ensure long term action is successful.

“Police advise us to use the 101 phone number, as call wait times are much improved.”

The council said it, alongside Wigginton Parish Council, funds youth services through the Haxby and Wigginton Youth and Community Association, which provides youth workers at Oaken Grove Community Centre.

This support aims to keep young people engaged and reduce incidents of ASB, the spokesperson said.

The council said it will continue working with police, bus services, and youth projects to address the problem.

Suggestions under consideration include improved street lighting, clearer sight lines, and the potential installation of CCTV cameras.

The council spokesperson added: “Separately, following ASB incidents earlier this year, we are also looking at ways to prevent vehicular access to the Ethel Ward Playing Field.

“We are optimistic that newly refurbished courts will mean more people using the playing field more often; and this we hope will discourage isolated incidents of bad behaviour.”

Builders

This is a catch-all term for chemicals that boost the cleaning efficiency of your detergents. Builders are used to soften water, which enhances the performance of your detergent. Sodium carbonate does this by raising the alkalinity of the water while silicates work to keep dirt off fabrics once it has been lifted and protect your washing machine against corrosion.

Capsules

Also known as pods or tabs, these are sachets containing liquid detergent. They’re quick and convenient because you don’t have to worry about dosing, but you can’t use them for pre-treating stains like you can with liquids. My top tip: place your pod at the back of the drum before you put the clothes in. This stops it from falling on the washing machine door and not mixing with the clothes. Some pods have sections that break down at different times in water, which helps to release ingredients like fabric softener at the right time in a wash cycle. If you live in a hard water area, you may need a double dose which can be costly.

Enzymes

Found in biological detergents, these are proteins that accelerate the breakdown of specific stain molecules. Just like how the enzymes in our bodies break down food, these chomp through tough stains including grease, sweat and blood. There are four classes of enzymes you might find on an ingredients list. Protease breaks down protein stains, such as blood, grass, egg and sweat; amylase is best for starchy stains, such as pasta or gravy; lipase handles fats and oils, including butter and cooking oil; while cellulase works on the cellulose fibres of fabric to prevent build-up on your clothes. Look for enzymes if you want to sanitise delicates without washing at high temperatures.

Fragrance-free

You should only see this on the packaging when there are no added perfumes or chemicals to create a scent.

Gels

Gels are a thicker variant of laundry liquids. They tend to come in squeezable bottles for easy application. You can apply them directly to the stains to treat them before washing.

Liquids

Liquids are thinner and runnier than gels. They penetrate fibres quickly making them great for delicates, but they’re prone to spilling which wastes product.

By MARTI STELLING, HEALTH REPORTER

Published: 00:01 BST, 20 September 2026 | Updated: 01:48 BST, 20 September 2026

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At least two people have been killed and six injured in a “massive” overnight Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region, Governor Andrei Vorobyev has said.

Vorobyev said 249 drones had been shot down, and he reported fires in several residential houses. A local warehouse was also ablaze. In the capital Moscow, an oil refinery was damaged, and flight restrictions were in place at two airports.

Earlier, a Ukraine official said seven people, including two children, were killed in Russian attacks in the Kyiv and Sumy regions on Saturday.

Russia and Ukraine have recently intensified their strikes, targeting energy-generating and transport facilities, as well as major logistics hubs.

In a post on Telegram on Sunday, Vorobyev said a 44-year-old woman was killed in Sofyino after a drone hit a three-storey residential building. Another five people – including two children – were injured, he said.

In the Orekhovo-Zuevo district, an elderly man died after a private house was hit, the regional governor said.

Videos have emerged on social media purportedly showing explosions in the night skies in the Moscow region, and of a burning warehouse. The footage has not been verified by the BBC.

Meanwhile, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said a drone struck a building near one of the capital’s boulevards and a facility at an oil refinery was damaged.

He said on social media that 450 drones heading for Moscow had been shot down in what he called an “unprecedented attack”.

Sheremetyevo – Moscow’s biggest airport – warned passengers about “temporary restrictions” in place, while at the capital’s Vnukovo airport all arrivals and departures were halted.

In Ukraine, a mother and her two small children, a boy and a girl, were killed in Saturday’s Russian attack in the city of Fastiv, Kyiv regional head Tymur Tkachenko said.

He added that several private houses were also damaged.

In the north-eastern Sumy region, four people were killed when a Russian drone hit the car they were travelling in, top local official Oleh Hryhorov said.

Both Russia and Ukraine have continued to hit energy infrastructure targets in the past week, despite US President Donald Trump claiming on social media that the two sides had agreed not to.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.