Nutcracker and Mouse King and the Tale of the Nutcracker - Paperback

The German romantic novelist Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (E T A) Hoffmann (1776-1822) wrote fantasy and Gothic horror, but was also a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. A number of his stories have inspired operas and ballets including Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, in which a fictionalized version of Hoffmann is the hero. Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based on the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802 at Villers-Cotterets in France. He received very little education but when he entered the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, he began to read voraciously and then to write. He is best remembered for his historical novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Dumas died in 1870. Robin Buss was a writer and translator who worked for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for The Times Educational Supplement. He published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French Through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He also translated a number of volumes for Penguin Classics. He died in 2006.