Author’s note

I envisaged this anthology as a kind of grown-up version of the books of myths and legends I enjoyed as a child. While some of the stories are suitable for children, a good number of them contain sexual themes, as found in the original texts, or are stylistically aimed at the adult reader.

Within the extracts themselves, [italic type within square brackets] denotes a stage direction or other observation in the original translated text. My own occasional editorial interpolations in the texts – mainly in the form of linking passages to connect a sequence of extracts from the same text or, very occasionally, in footnotes, appear in unbracketed italic type.