26 November 1831: As a revised edition of Frankenstein is published, Mary Shelley reveals the genesis of the story.
20 November 1922: The Manchester Guardian reports the death of French novelist Marcel Proust and reviews a collection of GK Chesterton’s poems.
8 July 1930: Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the first to popularise the detective fiction genre.
1 February 1960: Dilys Rowe meets Iris Murdoch, author, Oxford don and a writer to rank with Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy.
14 December 1966: In this comment piece Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, says he has not mellowed into middle age.
13 February 1974: Following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the west, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is arrested, causing uproar in literary circles.
13 January 1976: Dame Agatha Christie’s huge popularity did not affect her life, which was ‘consistently and rigidly private, the model of inscrutability.’
14 October 1976: Angela Carter reveals her thoughts on the master of Gothic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, who was misunderstood by his countrymen but admired by European intellectuals.
2 June 1986: Crime writer PD James, who died last week, is revealed to be ‘very much nicer to meet than her books might lead one to expect’ in this archive interview.
24 August 1990: Ray Bradbury, the man who gave science-fiction a soul, discusses life, love and the beauty of things, with John Ezard.
