Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

Karl Hans Strӧbl was born in Jihlava, Moravia in the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the 18th of January 1877.His education finished with his studies at the University of Prague, where he became involved in nationalist student politics, a precursor to his later right-wing and anti-semitic viewpoints.In 1910 he wrote an apocalyptic novel ‘Eleagabal Kuperus’, which was later adapted into a silent film.His literary output was prolific and r...

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society.In literature the ambition is much narrower. In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published. And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading. Obviously for most of humanity’s time people couldn’t read and texts couldn’t be publishe...

To be a woman is to be half the world’s population but, in many countries, unfortunately still now and for most of history, women were decidedly second class, normally no more than chattels and the bearers and nurturers of children. As society involved into a complex and overlapping system where education and equality begin to seek space things began to change. In this volume our authors describe and reveal how life actually felt for almost all women before the recent past.

Charles Dickens was born on the 7th February 1812, in Portsmouth, England, the second of eight children. The family endured many financial struggles and, when he was just 12, his father was sent to Marshalsea debtors' prison, the result of which was Dickens finished his education and went to work in a rat-infested boot-blacking factory to help pay off the debt. These experiences of neglect and hardship were to later provide themes in his books such as ‘Little Dorrit’ and ‘David Copperfield...

In the annual celebration of faith many things are not quite as they seem. Words in the hands of authors such as Anton Chekhov, Hugh Walpole, Ethel Lina White, Lucy Maud Montgomery and many others weave narratives that all become a little on the dark side.1 - A Strange Christmas - Tales from the Dark Side - An Introduction2 - At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov3 - The Christmas Banquet by Nathaniel Hawthorne4 - The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson...

The bookshelves of European literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is the Danish writer Jørgen Vilhelm Bergsøe.

Walter Lionel George was born to British parents on the 20th March 1882 in Paris, France.It was not until he was a young man of 20 that he learned English. In 1905 he moved to London to work in an office but soon found himself working as a journalist, and as a foreign correspondent, for various London newspapers.By 1911, with the publication of his first novel ‘A Bed of Roses’, which portrayed the fall of a penniless young woman into prostitution, his efforts were rewarded,...

The bookshelves of World literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From their countries and continents their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Ricardo Fernandez Garcia.

The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Ralph Plummer.

An author’s talents may seem obvious and indisputable as they move words and ideas into gathered phrases and stories.But where do these ideas and stories come from? A lonely thought that suddenly gathers form? An inspiration from a Muse? A suggestion from an everyday event?Perhaps in the case of their darker, more malevolent stories, other forces are at work. They help to nourish single words into sentences and paragraphs that ease themselves from the shadows and are sudden...

John Donne was born on the 22nd January 1572 in London, into a Roman Catholic family when Catholicism was illegal in England, and there was turbulence and unrest with both state and church throughout much of Europe.His father, also named John, died when he was four, and his mother, Elizabeth Haywood, married a wealthy widower, ensuring the family were looked after. He received a good education at both Oxford and Cambridge but was unable to obtain a degree without taking the oath of...