"This collection draws together essays written over twenty-five years, offering a wide-ranging retrospective of Marina Warner's developing ideas. Whether writing on literature, drama, film or opera, or on religion, politics, gender and language, Marina Warner displays a rare gift for blending historical and anthropological insights with deft and perceptive readings of individual works." "The sections of the book range from explorations of our taste for the miraculous, whether it be the Virgin Mary and angels, or voodoo and showers of toads, to the power of symbols and the complexity of human attitudes to bodies and minds, to ourselves and strangers. Finding unexpected links between the images of poetry, fiction, art and politics, she turns her attention to the Caribbean and to contemporary uses of myth, magic and fairy tale. On the way, she allows us to listen attentively, in unexpected ways, to powerful voices of past and present, from St. Paul and Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll and Angela Carter."--BOOK JACKET.