Lisa Hilton's top 10 scandalous French novels

Matthew Pearl is the author of The Dante Club, a literary thriller about a group of 19th-century Harvard scholars secretly working on a translation of The Divine Comedy who are forced out of hiding by a series of gruesome murders modelled on Dante's Inferno

Professor Jean E Howard teaches early modern literature at Columbia University, USA. She is president of the Shakespeare Association of America and co-editor of Marxist Shakespeares. Her previous publications include Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories and The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England

Merlin Holland is Oscar Wilde's grandson and the sole executor of his estate. He is the author of Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess, the first unabridged publication of the famous libel trial

From St Ives to Aldeburgh, the Lakes to Stonehenge, Margaret Drabble describes her favourite places to go walking in the footsteps of great writers

Philip Davis is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. His publications include The Experience of Reading, Sudden Shakespeare and, most recently, The Victorians in the new Oxford English Literary History Series. He is currently writing a biography of the American novelist Bernard Malamud for Oxford University Press

Adrian Poole is Reader in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College. His books include Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example, Coriolanus and Henry James. He has co-edited The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation and edited several nineteenth-century classics, including Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae and Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

A peer of writers such as Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock and Samuel R Delany, Spinrad's best known and most controversial novels, 1969's Bug Jack Barron and 1972's The Iron Dream - the latter featuring Adolf Hitler as a pulp SF author - were republished in the UK last year by Toxic Press. The French edition of The Iron Dream earned the author the Prix Apollo in 1974. A new novel, Greenhouse Summer, was published last year, but as a protest at what he sees as publishers' cynical promotion of business over literary value, Spinrad is offering the US rights to his next novel, He Walked Among Us, for $1 to anyone who will "publish it properly".

Jenny Colgan is the author of Amanda's Wedding and Looking for Andrew McCarthy