The book was first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written”. It became an immediate best seller. By the late 19th century, explorers were uncovering ancient civilisations and their remains around the world, such as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and the empire of Assyria. Inner Africa remained largely unexplored and King Solomon’s Mines, one of the first novels of African adventure published in English, captured the public’s imagination.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the last novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Italy, and in 1929, in France. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable four-letter words.