The Rainbow

The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by D.H. Lawrence which tells the story of three generations of an English family in the Midlands.  It was banned in Britain for its frank treatment of sexuality.   Women in Love was a sequel to this novel.

Emblem book

An emblem book is a book of emblems (symbolic, allegorical, or representational pictures) with accompanying text, usually poetic.  Francis Quarles was a 17th century English poet best known for his book Emblems, which was on Scriptural scenes.

Peter Drucker

The thing I learned today is that Peter Drucker was an Austrian-American consultant sometimes called "the father of modern management." He is known for his book "Concept Of the Corporation," a study of how business leadership works. Drucker taught that management is a liberal art, and that managers should provide leadership for the common good.

Tom Sawyer

The thing I learned today is that Tom Sawyer, the character, appears in no less than four novels by Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894); and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896).

Ian Fleming, an amateur bird watcher, named James Bond after an American ornithologist.

The joke-like lines, "Knock, knock, knock! Who's there.." appear in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," spoken by the porter in Act II.

Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of "Gone With the Wind," was originally named Pansy O'Hara in early drafts of the novel.

Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler was a writer and futurist, best known for his works Future Shock and The Third Wave. He predicted how technology will shape how people feel and interact in a post-industrial society.

Erewhon

Samuel Butler was a 19th-century British writer most famous for his satire of utopian ideals and Victorian mores, "Erewhon."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print. the first edition was published between 1768 and 1771.

Michael Cassio is the lieutenant in Shakespeare's "Othello" whom Iago believes he has been unfairly passed over in favor of.

O-Lan is the name of a character in the novel (and movie) The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Born and sold a slave, she married farmer Wang Lung and becomes respectable, but the family's fortune slowly declines as China changes.