Animal tales
From well-known and treasured stories including Aesop’s Fables, Black Beauty and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, to writers such as Michel de Montaigne, Anton Chekhov and T.S. Eliot, storytellers have used animals not only to capture the imagination of readers, but to deliver powerful and revealing messages about what it means to be human. Animal...
Lines in the Ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage
Just a matter of weeks after the long-anticipated discovery of Sir John Franklin’s lost ship HMS Erebus, the British Library looks back on 400 years of fascination with the fabled Northwest Passage. From Charles II’s lavish personal atlas to 19th-century woodcut illustrations and wooden maps crafted by Inuit communities, Lines in the Ice features material from Europe, Canada and...
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
This major new exhibition at the British Library explores Gothic culture’s roots in British literature and celebrates 250 years since the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Alongside the manuscripts of classic novels such as Frankenstein, Dracula and Jane Eyre, Terror and Wonder brings the dark and macabre to...
Enduring war
Christmas cards, letters, cartoons, posters and the manuscripts of celebrated war poets are among the collection on display for the first time in Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Museum. The exhibition explores the many ways those both at home and on the front line tried to...
