Books by Richard Doyle

The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family.

The richness of the Treasure Valley, high in the mountains of Stiria is lost through the evil of the owners, the two elder "Black Brothers", Hans and Schwartz, who in their foolishness mistreat Southwest Wind, Esquire, who in turn floods their valley, washing away their "liquid assets", and turning their valley into a dead valley of red sand. Forced into a trade other than farming, Hans and Schwartz become goldsmiths. They cruelly melt their younger brother Gluck's prize heirloom, a golden mug. This action releases the King of the Golden River for Gluck to pour out of the crucible as a finely dressed little golden dwarf. The dwarfish king offers a proposition to brothers: if someone were to climb up to the source of the Golden River high in the mountains and throw into it at least three drops of "holy water", it would become, for that person only, a river of gold. That person must do it on his first and only attempt or be overwhelmed by the river to become a black stone.

Before he joined the staff of Punch and designed its iconic front cover, illustrator Richard "Dicky" Doyle was a young man whose father (political caricaturist John Doyle) charged him with sending a weekly letter, even though they lived under the same roof.

Drawing on tools from rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author argues that the ascent of molecular biology, with its emphasis on molecules such as DNA rather than organisms, was enabled by crucial rhetorical "softwares."