Tony Black has created an original collection of paintings in his very distinctive and unique style that feature the best known authors in Britain.

See the Art of Tony Black

Agatha Christie is the doyen of the Country House mystery murder, that must have inspired one of the world’s most famous board games. ​

“The queen of the cosy crime novel seemed to pop out a novel every five minutes and has a vast backlist of instantly recognisable titles. I always thought of her plots as like little puzzles the reader was tasked to solve, or like a game of Cluedo played in a draughty old manor house”

The most celebrated author Charles Dickens and his definitive rags to riches tale, Oliver Twist

“An authors life story is always interesting to mean terms of how it influences the work, and none more than Dickens’s. It’s Oliver Twist’s fall from grace, and how this mirrors Dickens’s own brush with poverty in his early years that always seems to make the “Please, sir” scene so poignant”

Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle created the brilliant forensic mind of Sherlock Holmes, the much loved literary detective who lived at 221B Baker Street in London.

“As both a Scotsman and a crime writer, Arthur Conan Doyle has a near mythical status for me. There is no other sleuth who comes close to the international success of Sherlock Holmes, and there’s quite a bit of competition clipping at his tweed cape”

George Orwell created a dystopian vision of the future in his famous and disturbing novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ …….Big Brother is watching you………​

“George Orwell has a very difficult face for an artist to portray, it’s almost expressionless. Thankfully, his work is bursting with ideas, especially 1984. I return to Orwell’s classic every couple of years and though he might have been out with the date, with every new reading I find we’ve crept closer to his predictions- in fact I’m due another read but fear we might actually be there!”

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s best known play’s………alas, poor Yorick.

“In Frank McCourt’s wonderful memoir Angela’s Ashes, the young Frankie makes the memorable quote that reading Shakespeare is “like having jewels in your mouth”. I can’t think of a better way of putting it – for the beauty of his language alone Shakespeare deserves his place as the world’s most beloved author”

Percy Bysshe Shelley is famous for his fiction and romantic poetry and his second wife, Mary Shelly, created Frankenstein.