In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of "Frankenstein's" creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this book, Daisy Hay returns to the objects and manuscripts of t...

The Bodleian Library is one of the few libraries outside Germany with a substantial number of medieval manuscripts from the German-speaking lands. These manuscripts, most of which were acquired by Archbishop Laud in the 1630s, during the Thirty Years...

"The Wind in the Willows" has its origins in the bedtime stories that Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair and then continued in letters (now held in the Bodleian Library) while he was on holiday. But the book developed into something much more s...

Many beautiful illuminated manuscripts survive from the Middle Ages and can be seen in libraries and museums throughout Europe. But who were the skilled craftsmen who made these exquisite books? What precisely is parchment? How were medieval manuscri...

Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England – from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, R...

Toby Litt is best known for his "hip-lit" fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In "Mutants", he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book b...

In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered – the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, w...

In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies" was the first collec...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

"All art and the love of art", Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal "Musings on Mortality", "allow us to negate our nothingness". As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immer...