A selection reflecting the varied enthusiasms of A.S. Byatt, this work sweeps from the Romantics and Victorians to modern British writers, from the art of Van Gogh to the poems of Sylvia Plath. Two sections trace Byatt's fascination with the complex links between the symbolic and the real, and her changing views on language and her own craft of writing. A.S. Byatt's novels include "Shadow of the Sun", "The Game", "The Virgin in the Garden", "Still Life", "Sugar and Other Stories" and "Possession: a Romance", winner of the "Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize and the 1990 Booker Prize.