One of the English language’s most skilled and beloved writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. As usual Bill Bryson says it best: “English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willf...

Gothic & Lolita charts the current trend of Gothic street fashion that has swept Japan over the last decade. Influenced by Western fashion trends from the mid 1980s, young teenagers, predominately adolescent girls, congregate in the urban centres of...

In a publishing career that spanned less than a decade, Jane Austen revolutionized the literary romance, using it as a stage from which to address issues of gender politics and class-consciousness rarely expressed in her day. The novels included in t...

For comic book fans everywhere, Marvel Year by Year A Visual Chronicle explores Marvel's fascinating story, decade by decade, year by year, month by month. Everything is covered chronologically, from the company's beginnings as Timely Comics in the l...

The French fashion designer Hedi Slimane (born 1968) began taking photographs long before he started making clothes, as his recent four-volume Anthology of a Decade box set revealed: "I've always taken pictures," he told former Interview magazine edi...

Death and immortality, sexual prowess and surrender, intimacy and alienation, rebellion and temptation. The allure of the vampire is eternal. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, 3rd edition, explores the historical, literary, mythologic...