Godwin enjoyed great celebrity in the 1790s and influenced varied writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound are virtually anarchist poems), William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Robert Owen.
But, while the additional web content varies widely from writer to writer, according to wealth, genre and reach, the message invariably seems to be that whatever digital desserts or amuse-bouches are on offer, the books themselves are still the main course.
While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand.
While the requests are varied, the letter writers have something in common: They all bought a list of foundations from one of the growing number of mail-order businesses selling false hopes of free money.
This extravagant claim is supported by writers as varied as Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron and William Dalrymple.
Anyway, to me, Kidnapped is his masterpiece, an unforgettable novel of action that would inspire writers as varied as Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark.
The Royal Court has long been flagbearer for new British drama, responsible for launching the careers of writers as varied as John Osborne and Sarah Kane.
Postmodern pyrotechnics, invented by the French and American academics, have been digested and retooled by writers as varied as David Foster Wallace, J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro.
The husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch, who has died aged 89, and Harriet Frank Jr specialised in adapting the work of writers as varied as William Faulkner, Larry McMurtry and Elmore Leonard.
His essay "Narrative Sentences" examines how a number of writers, as varied as Defoe and Beckett, have made the form their own.
