Seen in the light of the past forty years, since the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rise of the present day theocracy, relations between Britain and Iran look dismal. Hopefully this will now turn out to be a historical blip and the two countries will once more enjoy a more fruitful relationship.

Nowadays India is one of the largest and most important centres of printing and publishing, the culmination of a tradition that started in the mid-sixteenth century with the Jesuits in Goa.

The first thing that needs saying is that not everybody that sets out for Timbuctoo gets there. In my case, driving down from Algiers in the 1970’s, much to my regret now, I got side tracked in Tamanrasset. In earlier times it was sickness and hostile locals that often proved fatal.

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), although born almost 200 years ago, seems very much a man of our times.

Need some motivation to keep on top of those new year resolutions? Who better to take advice from than famous authors, poets and novelists.

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of one of those moments that schoolchildren remember all their lives, for a single phrase.

Our story begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the fairytale illustrated by Sergey Malyutin which was revolutionary in terms of book illustration as it incorporated design into every aspect.

Where collecting is concerned, the Qur’an is a multi-faceted text that has taken many forms since its arrival in the Muslim world over a millennia ago.

Written by Roxana Kashani

As book lovers we all owe a debt of gratitude to the Sumerians, the early inhabitants of the land now called Iraq, who invented writing 5000 years ago.

The banning of books by dissident authors in repressive regimes such as Stalinist Russia is well-documented, but here are some titles you might not have realised were also banned – in some cases, much closer to home.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the publication of some of the most beautiful natural history books ever printed.