Oscar Wilde's children's stories explore timeless themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, love and death, beauty and self-sacrifice. Featuring princesses, ogres and talking animals, the questions they pose are as pertinent now as they we...

The much-loved tales from "The Thousand and One Nights" first appeared in English translation in the early nineteenth century. The popularity of these ancient and beguiling tales set against the backdrop of Baghdad, a city of wealth and peace, stoked...

To judge by the worldwide success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Poirot, it is not only the Anglo-Saxons who have an appetite for mystery and mayhem. Talking about the craft of detective writing and sharing her personal...

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, wrote the first draft of "Frankenstein" after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost writing competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Returning to England in the autumn...

A beautiful little manuscript in the Bodleian Library, which was purchased for GBP 6 at auction in 1887, was discovered afterwards to belong to none other than Margaret, Queen of Scotland and was, according to her biographer, her favourite book. The...