Pub London's pubs had closed. The closures have been ascribed to factors such as changing tastes, rise in the cost of beer due to applied taxes and the increase in the Muslim population. Inns and taverns feature throughout English literature and poetry, from The Tabard Inn in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" onwards. The highwayman Dick Turpin used the Swan Inn at Woughton-on-the-Green in Buckinghamshire as his base. Jamaica Inn near Bolventor in Cornwall gave its name to a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier and a 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1920s John Fothergill (1876–1957) was the innkeeper of
The Birds and Other Stories the fantasy genre, some bordering on science fiction, the stories were "largely overlong and not too original." The Birds and Other Stories The Birds and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Daphne du Maurier, originally published in 1952 as The Apple Tree by Gollancz in the United Kingdom. It includes "The Birds," which was made into a film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. The anthology was published in the United States as Kiss Me Again, Stranger by Doubleday and then has been republished under the current name, "The Birds and Other Stories". Reviewing