Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy-tale horror, and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In Nights at the Circus, she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th Century world, which reeks of human and animal vitality...Nights at the Circus is a book with many stories but Angela Carter has not softened her demands upon the reader. It remains the language that holds the power source: rudely colloquial perhaps but none the less dense, and detailed with delight.