There are a range of women not represented in the Western fairy tale tradition. Husband-beaters are particularly interesting, as well as male pederas….

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds w….

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm..

One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs re….

I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Some….

Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It's a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways….

Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stor….

Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, t….

The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on ….

The French Revolution printed money because they didn't have any, so they just printed it, and this was a revolutionary step which of course we are s….

I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men,….

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of….

Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landsca….

The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of ….

There is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories ar….

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos..

Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, trader….

The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover..

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is..

The tripartite structure - so you remember the third brother, second brother, first brother, or the first dervish, second dervish, and third dervish.….

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive..