Literary Miscellany

Charles Dickens' life was staggeringly busy and various. This new miscellany will give readers a chance to get to know the man and his work through his work and its major themes. With carefully chosen quotations from the novels but also from his sketches and journalism, discover what Dickens had to say about the big issues like Crime, The Family, Education and Money. Meet here, too, those wonderful characters that have been handed down to us like the real figures of history – Mr Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield and many more. What is it that made Dickens special? Concentrated in these pages is a selection of all the mad humour, passionate indignation, moral conviction, plain good sense and sheer unstoppable energy that made up one of the very greatest of English writers.

P.G. Wodehouse saw his first article published when still at school, and went on to become the leading humour writer of the twentieth century. He created characters famous across the English-speaking world, such as Rupert Psmith, Stanley Ukridge, Uncle Fred, the inhabitants of the Drones Club, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and Lord Emsworth and his beloved Empress, all of whom remain as popular today as they were when they first appeared all those years ago. But behind all the brilliant metaphors that make us laugh out loud, there is a surprising background of reality. Wodehouse didn't create his stories from scratch; he used real settings and exaggerated the characteristics of people he knew. With examples of Wodehouse's unique imagery, the P.G. Wodehouse Miscellany follows the development and progress of his legendary characters, tells us where Wodehouse got his ideas from and demonstrates why his admirers included Bertrand Russell, Berthold Brecht, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling and the Kaiser. This informative little miscellany will be a must for all fans of P.G. Wodehouse.

This miscellany explores the fascinating and enigmatic world of J.R.R. Tolkien, examining his place in literary history, his books and his iconic characters. The reader can explore facts and trivia from Tolkien's life and works, including his early life in southern Africa and Birmingham, Tolkien on the silver screen, his role in the two world wars and his friendship with C.S. Lewis, as well as the places that inspired his fictional world of Middle-earth. Both light-hearted and highly informative, this miscellany offers an insight for new and old Tolkien fans into one of the great writers of the twentieth century.