An example of 18th-century right-wing conservative commentary: ‘The New Atalantis.’
Transliteracies Project
Anonymous satire by a 1709 political writer worked like today's partisan clickbait.
flickr
Written by Kenneth Grahame as a story for his young son, The Wind in the Willows has also been read as a social satire and a gay allegory.
Dream fulfilled: Maxim de Winter and his second wife arrive at Manderley.
KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX
It's a very modern version which gives the female characters more agency than in previous adaptations.
A young Virginia Woolf photographed in 1902.
Wikimedia Commons
Written in 1929, this short, passionate book highlighting the silencing of women's voices continues to shape our culture.
SIngapore Grip: the final book in JG Farrell’s Empire Trilogy.
ITV Pictures
The writer was drowned at the age of 44, but he left three novels which have come to represent the decline of the British Empire.
Shutterstock
Great stories move and they challenge. They draw attention to diverse social and cultural issues and to the transformative potential of empathy. But they can be difficult too.
A legend, even in his own lifetime: stamps to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth.
Royal Mail/PA Archive/PA Images
Almost as soon as Dickens died in 1870, writers and illustrators began to take liberties with his life and career.
Illustration from Our Mutual Friend by Marcus Stone. Wood engraving by Dalziel.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Dickens had some clever little narrative tricks, which become clear when his work is analysed as a single data set.
Hippocrates refusing the gifts of Artaxerxes. Engraving by Raphael Massard, 1816.
Wellcome Images
Bleach to defeat COVID-19 or fire to dispel plague, history is full of quack medicine.
Dudarev Mikhail via Shutterstock
A great novel transports you to a time and a place. Here are five of them.
Waxwork of Shakespeare by Madame Tussauds in Berlin.
Anton Ivanov via Shutterstock
New technology is helping archaeologists uncover details of the playwright's home, workplaces and his final resting place.
Martin’s Droeshout portrait of William Shakespeare (1623)
Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The Bard's plays have an unfair reputation for being hard. You're probably reading them in the wrong way.
Michael via Flickr
Some of the most exciting fiction and memoir is being done in the form of graphic novels. Here are some of the very best.
Pilots and air crew passing the time with books and newspapers.
S.A. Devon, RAF official photographer/Imperial War Museum
Books were an important weapon on the home front in the second world war.
A street during the Great Plague in London, 1665, with a death cart and mourners.
Wellcome Images
Written 60 years after the bubonic plague swept London, Defoe's account may have been a hoax, but it still rings true today.
Sophie Elvis/Unsplash
Last year saw the first cohort of English literature students who were born in or beyond 2000 – the so-called digital generation. I wanted to know whether the classics still affected their lives.
Dickens After Death, John Everett Millais, June 10 1870.
Charles Dickens Museum
How two ambitious men put their own interests ahead of the great writer and his family in an act of institutionally-sanctioned bodysnatching.
Image courtesy of Lionsgate
The latest version of Dickens' classic is a refreshingly diverse tale of the triumph of the ordinary heroism over everyday evil.
Africa Studio via Shutterstock
Memoirs of the morning after: because literature tells us the hangover is about so much more than physical symptoms.
Jane Austen based on a portrait by her sister Cassandra.
Wikimedia Commons
When her contemporaries were engaging with European themes in their novels, Austen remained rooted in her home country.