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Curated category

British novels adapted into films

  • James BondJames Bond was born from a very deliberate act of boredom management. On the 17th of February 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in…
  • The Pickwick PapersThe first issue of The Pickwick Papers appeared in March 1836. It contained two chapters and cost one shilling. Each subsequent number followed a strict…
  • A Christmas CarolA Christmas Carol was published on the 19th of December 1843, and by Christmas Eve the entire first run of 6,000 copies had sold out.
  • The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings began with a birthday party. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit celebrating his eleventy-first year, slips on a magic ring and vanishes from his…
  • The Borrowers (novel)Mary Norton published The Borrowers in 1952 through Dent. This children's fantasy novel introduced a family of tiny people living secretly within the walls…
  • FrankensteinFrankenstein begins not with a monster but with a question whispered around a log fire. In the rainy summer of 1816, Mary Shelley sat at Lord Byron's Villa…
  • Jane EyreJane Eyre arrived in London bookshops on the 19th of October 1847, published under a pen name that gave nothing away: Currer Bell.
  • Harry PotterHarry Potter is a series of seven novels written by British author J. K. Rowling, and the story behind it begins on a crowded train from Manchester to London…
  • The Other Boleyn GirlThe Other Boleyn Girl opens in 1521, when a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Boleyn is handed over to a king. Her father Thomas Boleyn and her uncle Thomas…
  • The War of the WorldsThe War of the Worlds, published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann, opens with a sentence that has unsettled readers for over a century: "Yet across…
  • Alice's Adventures in WonderlandAlice's Adventures in Wonderland began not on a page, but on a river. On the 4th of July 1862, Lewis Carroll and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the…
  • Midnight's ChildrenSaleem Sinai was born precisely at midnight on the 15th of August 1947, the exact moment India became an independent country.
  • Pride and PrejudicePride and Prejudice opens with one of the most debated sentences in English literary history: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in…
  • Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, began not in a writer's imagination but in a schoolboy's hands.
  • Heart of Darkness"The horror! The horror!" Those are the dying words of Kurtz, an ivory trader at the center of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist…
  • To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse arrives with a question rather than a story: can a child's disappointment about a cancelled boat trip hold the whole weight of human…
  • The Two TowersThe Two Towers first appeared in print during 1954 as the second volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
  • Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels arrived in London bookshops on the 28th of October 1726, priced at 8 shillings and 6 pence, and within days it had become the talk of the…
  • The Return of the KingJ. R. R. Tolkien conceived The Lord of the Rings as a single work containing six books plus extensive appendices. In 1953, he proposed specific titles for…
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins not with a monster, but with a lawyer on a Sunday walk. Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London solicitor…
  • The Lost World (Doyle novel)Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood before the Royal Geographical Society on the 13th of February 1911. He listened intently as his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett…
  • The Fellowship of the RingThe Fellowship of the Ring arrived in British bookshops on the 29th of July 1954, the first of three volumes that together would become one of the most…