The Emperor —so they say — sent a message, dictated from his death bed no less, sent it to you alone, to you his feeble subject, to that miniature shadow hiding at the remotest distance from the imperial sun. He instructed the messenger to kneel down beside his bed so…

The hound has not barked, The night-time is blue: All questions are marked By the hook that goes through. All answers present Faux-certitude’s blot Of sinuous dissent And perduring full-stop. Such ‘inter-’ rogation Is mappishly seen: Yes-kingdom, No-nation, And a place inbetween.

Stories of a species of gigantic human living in Patagonia were common in the 17th and 18th century, and continued into the 19th. Since there were no such giants, the persistence of this testimony is itself striking. …

Today, in excitable Bardolitism: a ‘new’ Shakespeare sonnet. Really? No, not really. Here’s the sonnet: The sonnet To the Deserving Author When I respect thy argument, I see An image of those times: but when I view The wit, the workmanship, so rich, so true, The times themselves do seem retrieved to me. And as Sejanus…

In the eighth book of his Natural History, Pliny lists a number of remarkable horses, including Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus (so-called because he was big and fierce as a bull: Alexander ‘was struck with its loveliness when only a boy, and bought it from the stud of Philonicus the Pharsalian…

Asked to provide the introduction to a 1995 reprint anthology of Leiber’s Lanhkmar stories, Michael Moorcock recalled the commercial climate of ‘sword and sorcery’ Fantasy writing in the early 1960s, when he himself first began publishing. He credits Cele Goldsmith Lalli (1933–2002) — editor of Amazing Stories from 1959 to…

Why did Terry Pratchett light upon the name Ankh-Morpork for his Discworld capital city? I have a theory. I can’t prove it, but so little can be proven in this, our sublunary world, so I propose to rehearse my theory here. It’s hard to deny, to begin with, that Ankh-Morpork…

The ‘Ainulindalë’, the first section of The Silmarillion (1977), is Tolkien’s creation myth, his account of how ‘Arda’, his fantasy realm, came into being. My question today is: does it make sense? This is where we start: There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he…

We know Carroll loved games, puns, diversions and cleverness of all kinds: the Alice books are shot through with these things, wordplay…