No work has challenged its readers like Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". His "Proverbs of Hell" have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of thes...

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...

This very special picture book is an unusual and utterly enchanting ABC, entirely devoted to the theme of Christmas. Each image opens a window onto some form of festive celebration, from the lighting of the candles on the tree, to bell-ringing, ice s...

This title includes books from the collection of J. A. Lukaszwicz (1799-1873), and other titles appearing under the label "Libri Polonici" n the Bodleian's pre-1920 holdings, totalling about 1600 items.

Taking its title from Howard Carter's famous description of his first glimpse of the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, this book offers a timeless portrait of highlights representing the range of the Bodleian Library's unique collections. The...