The complete online text of The Arabian Nights by Andrew Lang.

More than any other British writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, Andrew Lang successfully championed the fairy tale as appropriate reading material for children. This astonishingly productive man of letters influenced children's literatur...

For more than thirty-five years, from 1875 to 1912, Andrew Lang's essays, reviews, and editorial leaders shaped the opinions and influenced the tastes of the reading public of England and the United States. He was a prolific and facile writer who was alw...

Andrew Lang was "the greatest bookman of our age, and after [Robert Louis] Stevenson, the last great man of letters of the old Scottish tradition," affirms George Gordon in The Dictionary of National Biography. A confirmed polymath and gifted polyglot, i...

IN 1962, the 14-year-old Larry Kidwell and his band Spectrum had their first paying gig at a University of Maryland frat house. "I knew 10 songs and we had to play for four hours, so we repeated ourselves quite a bit," says Kidwell, who's...

IT HAS been an odd autumn for children's literature. One of its finest writers, Jill Paton Walsh, almost won the 1994 Booker prize for fiction for a novel, written for adults, that she had to publish herself. Although she has written 40 books...

Michael Faraday wasn't about to limit himself to logic.That's because Faraday, the pre-eminent scientist of his time, believed quantum leaps in technology came not just from logic, but imagination, too."Let us encourage ourselves with a little more imagination prior to experiments," he told a group...

"This is the famous city of Baghdad, the home of sweetness! She lies beyond the assaults of winter, sleeping in the shade of her roses in an eternal Spring, with flowers and gardens and the murmur of many streams!" That description, from the Arabian Nights,...