Auteur: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

This Dictionary is a guide to the literary terms most relevant to students and readers of English literature today, thorough on the essentials and generous in its intellectual scope. With terms as wi …

‘I go about the street with water-creases crying, "Four bunches a penny, water-creases."’ London Labour and the London Poor is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of l …

‘What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?’Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostl …

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson’s birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of cri …

‘What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?’Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostl …

‘you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret…’Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prosp …

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson’s birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of cri …

‘this is all a fairy tale…and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true’The Water-Babies (1863) is one of the strangest and most powerful children’s stories ever written. …

‘this is all a fairy tale…and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true’The Water-Babies (1863) is one of the strangest and most powerful children’s stories ever written. …

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDThis is the secret history of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.Wonderland is part of our cultural heritage. But beneath the fairy tale lies the complex h …

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The year is 1851. It’s a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty and disease. It’s a …

‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children’s literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret …

‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children’s literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret …

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‘you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret…’Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prosp …

A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. A book that will stay with you for life NATALIE HAYNES The …

Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculi …