Charles Dickens

Former Tory MP and government minister, Ann Widdecombe, recommends her favourite childhood books.

The author chooses his top five books on boyhood and growing up, major themes of his Booker-nominated debut The Fishermen.

Children’s author, Audrey Penn, picks five books she loved as a teenager – all stories of struggle in the face of adversity.

Christine L. Corton describes how Londoners loved and hated the fog that defined their city for over 200 years. Fog bought confusion, suicide and death; but also anonymity, mystery and beauty. Here, she picks the best five books on the pea-souper

A city of hidden depths and morbid fascination, by turns respectable and savage. Iain Sinclair picks five novels that capture the spirit and rich history of London.

‘The attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now.” Jeffery Archer on his favourite bestsellers (not by him).

In the last of our series of interviews on American progressivism, the mayor of Los Angeles chooses five novels and biographies that provide lessons from the past and show what a democratic society should aspire to be

Iraqi academic May Witwit tells of the horrors of US-occupied Iraq: “We were being shot at, and for three days a body lay at my front gate and nobody dared to move him”

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-winner talks about his creation of micro-credit and walks us through his five books on poverty and how to eradicate it – includes Zola’s Germinal and Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities

The historian and biographer of London picks five books that shine a light on parts of this vast, complex and confusing city where, he says, pathos and pantomime meet

The chairman of the Equalities & Human Rights Commission says discrimination and social injustice won’t be changed by what happens in courtrooms or parliament but by how we all behave

When it was published on December 19th, 1843, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was an instant classic. As families settle in front of the fire to read it aloud on Christmas Eve, Oxford Professor of English Literature Robert Douglas-Fairhurst runs through the best of Dickens’s prolific writings about Christmas.

He was the most popular novelist of the Victorian era, a convivial family man who always championed the underdog. But he also harboured dark secrets that only came out after his death. Jenny Hartley recommends the best Charles Dickens books and discusses the phenomenon that was and is Charles Dickens.

The stories we tell ourselves affect our decision-making in profound ways, says psychotherapist turned bestselling author Salley Vickers. Here, she recommends five novels that delve into the psychology of the self—and of society.

The professor of English literature tells us about his favourite novels in a golden era for fiction, and the dilemma, still with us today, that led Dickens to write two different endings for Great Expectations

What makes the most successful societies tick? The RSA’s Matthew Taylor says we should recognise that relationships and values are more important than scientific or economic advances

Did you know that Santa Claus was a 4th century bishop in what is now Turkey? That Puritans tried to outlaw Christmas? Or Tiny Tim was originally Little Fred? Religious scholar Bruce Forbes sheds light on Christmas’s pagan past and consumerist present.

Teachers play an important role in our educational and emotional development. But we have a complex relationship with them: one marked by firm boundaries and an unequal power dynamic. Here, novelist and former schoolmaster David Hargreaves discusses five classic works of fiction that portray teachers walking this line with varying degrees of success.