When we set out to pick the ten characters from literature that we’d hate to have over for Christmas dinner, we had one simple rule – no monsters.
By that we meant out-and-out creatures of the night - Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Milton’s Satan were both chucked out early - as well as human monsters like Annie Wilkes from Misery.
No, what we were looking for were the real men, women and children from literature that would ruin our Christmas day.
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As it happened, the final list began to make a figgy toffee pudding with the undead seem quite palatable...