From Boxing Day, the millions of Brits lucky enough to own one of Nintendo’s handheld DS machines can now load it up with the complete texts of some 100 classic novels and plays, all carefully plucked from the HarperCollins lists and archives and lovingly crafted into digital facsimile editions…

A Nintendo fan since the ’80s, it’s been huge fun to watch the iconic, colourful covers of our Collins Pocket Classic series…

…get whipped wholesale into the video games world. Scrolling the virtual bookshelf with the DS stylus and touchscreen is a particular joy…

You can see the full list of titles included on the amazon page, but we think we’ve dropped in something for everyone. Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice and more – it’s been enormous fun to pull out our definitive list of legendary literature. And if the 100 titles still aren’t quite enough, you can also hook you DS up to the web and download some bonus books we’ve been keeping in reserve…

Alongside the stories themselves, we also commissioned brand new introductions to each book and each author, and there are all manner of ways of navigating your digital library - tell the DS what you like and it’ll even make suggestions for you.

There are plenty more features beside – if you’ve a DS yourself (or you know someone else who has) you can hop over now and preorder. Happy Reading!

Despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, the Great Bard’s life is still a dense thicket of myths and traditions.

Even Bill Bryson – travel writer, polymath and a master of research – found the world’s most famous writer a rather slippery character: in his new biography Shakespeare: The World as a Stage he declares him at once “the best known and least known of figures”.

In this short extract from the book, Bill begins his quest for the Bard by tracking down the only three existing (and contested) portraits of the great man – and examines what these few uncertain images can tell us about a life.

Click the arrow above to play – and you can download the entire audiobook over at audible.com…

“There aren’t many novels about people simply growing old” declares novelist, columnist and critic Philip Hensher in an upper room off Christ Church Quad.

Hensher’s certainly been keen to challenge himself – The Northern Clemency is an ambitious novel tracking the adventures of two ordinary families in a quiet Sheffield suburb, and allowed him a very exciting sense of embarking on new territory – territory that “hadn’t already been written about millions of times before”.

Set over twenty eventful years – from 1974 to 1994 – and weighing in at an impressive 700 pages, the book’s an impressive chronicle of an eventful era. Hensher admitted that he’d been fascinated to revisit the changing face of British society over that relatively short period – a country that within twenty years turned from a manufacturing nation (he quotes the words of Winston Churchill, “built from coal and surrounded by fish”) to a service culture in thrall to the banker and the hedge fund.

And yet in his three lively readings – from a whistlestop tour of a 90s London PR Agency to a brief encounter with 80s Sheffield anarchists “The Sparticists” (”So left wing they smash up CND meetings”) – Hensher reveals that much of The Northern Clemency’s success lies in his peculiar eye for the small and personal details of life in the very recent past…

Every good schoolboy knows that the indominatable British mainland has only been conquered twice – first by the noble Julius Caesar; secondly by those perfidious French. Lisa Jardine wants us to call it three.

As Tom Tower rang it’s 101 chimes, Jardine explored the conclusions of her book, Going Dutch for a curious Oxford Festival audience – making the case for 1688’s Glorious Revolution as “the invasion we’ve chosen to forget”. The British like to imagine that William of Orange’s ousting of the Catholic James II represented the UK ‘hoovering up’ the Dutch royal family; for the Dutch, Jardine claims, the south coast landings were a bold military manouevre that very nearly united the crowns for good.

It’s no great surprise the revolution has been swept under the rug of history – the invasion launched by William (and wife Mary) was an oddity from the start. Marching furiously north with his impressive landing force, he suspended operations to enjoy a peaceful tour of Wilton House and it’s delightful gardens – thus leading the first army ever held up by topiary. And they say the English always stop for tea.

Of course, it was also a family affair – which might also go some way to explain why we Brits so limply handed over the crown to a foreign force. Outgoing monarch James II was Mary’s father; William and Mary themselves, married aged 9 and 14, were terrifyingly closely related (or ‘very first cousins‘, as Jardine generously puts it) and a good ten minutes lecture time is spent unravelling the horrendously entwined, quasi-legal love lives of the British, Dutch and French royal families – only to conclude, rather vaguely, that everyone was related to everyone else.

And of course it’s family affairs, not force of arms, that ultimately decided Britain’s future. From 1668, the Orange Dynasty’s control over British power and even British culture was so strong that had William and Mary not died without an heir, Jardine very seriously suggests, we’d all now be speaking Dutch…

In the impressive surroundings of Christ Church’s Great Hall, bestselling historian Max Hastings admits to feeling a great sense of privilege that he’s able to “spend hours on end in the four corners of the Earth” listening to the personal testimonies of history’s survivors.

While there’s clearly enormous amounts of library work compacted into his comprehensive histories, vivid eyewitness accounts have always been central to Hasting’s books – and latest title Nemesis is no different, attempting to recreate the experiences of civilians and soldiers of all the sides entwined in World War II’s pacific battlefields.

Setting out to challenge some of the myths around Japan’s notoriously brutal campaigns, Hastings explained that his research only confirmed for him that the Japanese conducted themsleves ‘even more hideously than the world knows today’. By way of illustration, he details the fate of one captured British troop. From 1000 men, 35 died in combat – but only 278 survived internment in Japanese camps.

Not surprisingly then, Nemesis also contains a spirited defence of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fired up with what he calls “the ferocity of despair”, Hastings confidently states that the Japanese troops would have fought on till the last man – and that even as little as a few more weeks of fighting would have led to much greater loss of life.

His book also takes a specific interest in the role of women in the Pacific War, (”Another side of the story that’s just as interesting as life on the front lines,”); emphasises the frustration felt by Allied troops suffering immense losses while the war in the West looked all but finished; and underlines how unharmoniously the American, British and even the Australian forces cooperated.

But it’s the Japanese who bear the brunt of Hasting’s lecture: “Japan is a glittering example of economic success and democracy,” he concludes, “but it’s hard to think of it as entirely part of our normal world as long as it continues to deny it’s own history.”

While Roger disappeared (at speed) I dragged Levi into the Green Room for a chat about his million selling sauce, his new book and the forthcoming Reggae Reggae Car – click the button to listen in. Rastafari Bless!

100 books, 15 minutes and an eager Oxford crowd: today the Fifth Estate Estate rolled onto the Literary Festival Site to give away a boot-full of the finest literature – and the good people of Oxford turned out to cheer us on.

Lit fans old and young scooped up modern classics from our beautiful new Perennial Collection, leaving our alarmingly yellow vehicle considerably lighter within a speedy quarter hour. Our JG Ballard, William Burroughs, Carole Shields and quite a lot more disappeared rather swiftly into the throng outside Christ Church college, and even The Times turned up for a gander…

With our guerilla giveaway well underway I took the chance to grab some cheesy snaps of Fifth Estate’s newest fans, books in hand. Hope they appreciate it – between negotiating Oxford’s notorious one-way system and scraping through Christ Church’s narrowest of gates, I think I might just be getting a ticket…

I always thought I had the measure of symmetry. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve never been a fan of algebra, and I’m regularly stumped by long division, but symmetry? Shapes and mirrors, right? I think I even know what tessellate means.

And yet part way through his enthralling lecture on the history (and future) of symmetry, mathmetician and author Marcus de Sautoy asks how many symmetries a Rubik’s cube has – and not only do I not have an answer, I don’t even understand the question. It’s 2.1×10²⁴, by the way, and I couldn’t have been more confused if he’d told me the answer was brown.

Clearly there’s much to learn – and Marcus is an excellent guide. De Sautoy’s fascinating lecture, and his book, Finding Moonshine begins with the intriguing story of Evariste Galois. Rejected by the mathematical community, and aged just twenty years old, Galois met his death in a duel in Paris – the cause of which remains unknown – leaving behind a stunning and prodigious body of work in the field of symmetry, and a theory that now bears his name.

It ends, two hundred years later, with The Monster – the latest, most alarmingly named development of Galois theory. The Monster is the most complex symmetrical object yet discovered – an object which can only exists in 196,883 dimensions – and which boasts more symmetries than there are atoms in the sun.

No, I don’t understand either – but De Sautoy’s passion for the subject is abundant, and incredibly infectious. His lecture conveys brilliantly the excitement of working at the very forefront of modern mathematics – and introduces us to some of the very quirky characters who’ve been similiarly drawn the to the ‘moonshine’ surrounding the many remaining enigmas of The Monster.

Literature and symmetry make unusual companions – never fully forgiven for its part in the worst rhyme in English literary history, Thomas Mann bizarrely claimed to find in symmetry ‘the very marrow of death’. Marcus de Sautoy might just be the man to put the record straight.

The Fifth Estate Estate is finally here – and it’s got its own page. Click over for more pictures – and find out what all those scribbles are…

We’ve loaded her up with a boot-full of books, and we’re in a generous mood. Over the next few days we’ll be cruising the mean streets of Oxford with our windows down and our system on, well, medium, blessing the city with the gift of free literature. So if you spot us around give us a wave – you might just get a book out of it.

“So you’ve come to the funny one?” said the girl taking my ticket to the talk led by the team behind TV’s trivia riot,Q.I.

While John sat through the horrors of rising tides and shrinking lakes on “a creative journey through climate change” just the other side of a creakingly timbered ceiling, I took the chance to hear QI creator John Mitchinson’s tour through the weird and wonderful of the animal kingdom, from pigs that glow in the dark to woodpeckers with ears on their tounges. I think I picked the right one.

Dressed head to toe in comedy sheep suit (”I’m very keen on sheep – and they get a lot of bad press”), Mr Mitchinson imparted unlikely fact after unlikely fact, from sheep that need to be peeled not shorn to self destructing angler fish and rats that giggle in ultrasound.

But his greatest admiration was reserved for the tiny tardigrade. Also cutely named “water bears” or “moss piglets”, the tardigrade’s fame lies in it’s curious ability to freeze itself entirely for as long as a hundred years – and become virtually indestructible in the process. Scientists love a challenge, of course, and in the name of research have tried every method imaginable to dispose of the tiny creatures – they’ve been boiled alive, frozen to absolute zero, blasted with radiation and immersed in liquid helium. Always keen to go one better, the Russians even shot one into space. All to no avail, of course: the Rasputin’s of the animal kingdom, tardigrades just wont die.

So much better than sheep, as it turns out – though comedy tardigrade costumes are, I suspect, quite hard to come by.