In this special guest post, Simon Thomas from Shiny New Books looks into the interesting life and work of Alan Alexander Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh…

1. A.A. Milne had a famous schoolteacher. A.A. Milne’s father John ran a small boys’ school, Henley House, and one of the teachers he employed was a young H.G. Wells. Wells was a few years away from publishing his first novel, The Time Machine, when he had a post at Henley House 1889-90 and taught Milne mathematics. It obviously rubbed off, as that was the subject Milne read at Cambridge.

2. He wrote a very prescient play about Christopher Robin. Almost. Before the success of Winnie the Pooh et al, and indeed before Christopher Robin was born, Milne was a very successful playwright. One of his early plays was The Great Broxopp, about the resentment a child felt against the father who had used…