The contrast between Titus and Steerpike is at the heart of Gormenghast.

In 1984 Sykes played the Genie in the children's film Gabrielle and the Doodleman, which also featured Windsor Davies ( who would also appear with Sykes in the BBC's Gormenghast in 2000 ), Bob Todd, Lynsey De Paul and Gareth Hunt.

Peake had intended to write a series of books following Titus Groan through his life, as well as detailing his relationship with Gormenghast.

Another valid classification would be to place Gormenghast in the genre of the grotesque, with marked gothic and surrealist influences.

In a way, the main character could be seen as the setting itself, with the castle and social structure of Gormenghast taking a central role in unifying the story.

To the West also lies the claw-like Gormenghast Mountain, with the Twisted Woods and Gormenghast river at its foot.

An immense, statuesque woman with coils of dark red hair, she pays little attention to her family or the rest of Gormenghast.

However, once given the chance to use her intelligence she turns out to be one of the cleverest people in the castle, when ( along with Flay and the doctor ) she recognizes and investigates the worrying changes transpiring in Gormenghast.

Believing that she is in every way the opposite of Gormenghast, Titus becomes infatuated with her.

Steerpike's rebellion is negative, as he desires to exercise control and power over others, seeking to overthrow the tyranny of Gormenghast with a tyranny of his own.

Titus ' dread and rebellion against the iron letter of Gormenghast Law ( enforced and embodied in his lifetime by the stony and loathsome dwarf Barquentine ) becomes one of the main factors leading to his preoccupation with freedom.

Author Anthony Burgess argued for the Gormenghast novels ' status as a major classic of the Twentieth century ; resounding with horrible images drawn from a century of war ; the Holocaust in Sepulchrave's library ; the attaching of a calf's skull to Sourdust's skeleton ; Flay and Swelter enacting their danse macabre in the hall of Spiders.

It is impossible to ignore the significance of madness as well as its relationship with genius and ( thwarted ) artistic expression as a theme in the Gormenghast novels.

Much of the material derived from Tim Finn's and Phil Judd's fascination with the work of English writer and artist Mervyn Peake – notably Spellbound, the track " Stranger Than Fiction " ( their concert centrepiece ) and " Titus ", named after the hero of Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.

Sessions has recently returned to formal acting, with parts ranging from James Boswell ( to Robbie Coltrane's Samuel Johnson ) in the UK TV series Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Isles ( 1993 ) to Doctor Prunesquallor in the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast ( 2000 ).

Other features quickly followed and, in 1981, he co-wrote ( with Michael Bakewell ) BBC Radio 4's adaptation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and has also adapted C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast for Radio 4, for which he received a Sony Radio Award in 1985.

He returned to Peake's writings in 2011 with The History of Titus Groan, a cycle of six one-hour plays for BBC Radio 4's ' Classic Serial ' based on Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone and Maeve Gilmore's Titus Awakes.

In 1993, Justin Kavanagh went on to form Gormenghast with childhood friend Ray Brock, Robert ' Gilly ' Gilbert and Dave Walsh.

Despite being hailed as a hero, Titus is intent on leaving Gormenghast to explore a wider world, and the novel ends with him dramatically riding away to seek his fortune in the unknown lands outside.

In 1992, Overlook Press ( the American publishers of the Gormenghast series ) printed at the end of Titus Alone the extant coherent portions of Mervyn Peake's Titus Awakes, with a brief introduction by John Watney.

The book was published by Overlook Press as Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast in June 2011 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Mervyn Peake's birth.

She also has an enduring friendship with Dr. Alfred Prunesquallor, the Gormenghast physician.

The book is set in the huge castle of Gormenghast, a vast landscape of crumbling towers and ivy-filled quadrangles that has for centuries been the hereditary residence of the Groan family and with them a legion of servants.

A large-framed woman with dark red hair, she pays no attention to her family or the rest of Gormenghast.

The story follows Titus as he travels far from Gormenghast and finds a futuristic world of industrialists and advanced technology ( in some ways anticipating the steampunk genre ).

Since Steerpike himself started out as a lowly kitchen boy and advanced upwards through the society of Gormenghast, perhaps it is also possible for Fuchsia to change her own destiny.

Mervyn Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in Peake's works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes the ancient walled city of Peking ( Beijing ) as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tientsin ( Tianjin ).

He bumbles through a desert for a time, then uses a canoe to row down the river, where the reader gets a surprise: although Gormenghast is a crumbling, medieval castle, Titus finds himself in a modern city.

He finished Titus Groan and Gormenghast and completed some of his most acclaimed illustrations for books by other authors, including Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark ( for which he was reportedly paid only £ 5 ) and Alice in Wonderland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Brothers Grimm's Household Tales, All This and Bevin Too by Quentin Crisp and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as producing many original poems, drawings, and paintings.

In 2000 Sykes appeared as Mollocks, the servant of Dr Prunesquallor, in the BBC's mini-series adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, which was the last production to feature both Milligan and Sykes ( although they did not appear together on screen ).

The immense, overwhelming presence of Gormenghast Castle ; its ' umbrageous ceilings ', its ' empire of red rust ' and the way in which it shapes and deforms the personalities of those who dwell in and under it, marks Gormenghast out as one of the great Gothic edifices, as Hill House in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House or Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

The stop-frame puppet animation, which depicts some of the events from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, was initially inspired when Joan found a tattered paperback copy of Titus Groan while she was staying at a youth hostel in Holland.

Shaw has also worked in film and television, including My Left Foot, Jane Eyre, Persuasion, Gormenghast, and five of the Harry Potter films in which she played Harry Potter's insufferable aunt Petunia Dursley.

* When Merlin first spies the Keep of the Four Worlds, he describes it as " an amazingly huge and complex structure, which I immediately christened Gormenghast.

They consist of three pages from which it is clear that, although Titus has left Gormenghast, the castle would remain active in his memory and important in the story.

Lumley doesn't acknowledge any of these as conscious inspirations, saying that Crow's time-clock ( which derives from Lovecraft's " Through the Gates of the Silver Key ") long predates Who ; that he's never read Peake's Gormenghast and that the similarity of names is coincidental ; and that he " was never too keen on " Derleth's Shrewsbury.

Fuchsia was buried on Gormenghast Mountain, at a site overlooking the Castle chosen by her mother, in a ceremony at which neither her brother the Earl, recovering as he was from the severe fever that followed his killing of Steerpike, nor Dr. Prunesquallor, who was caring for the Earl, could attend.

He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books.

It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans, and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.

The song " The Drowning Man ", by British band The Cure, is inspired by events in Gormenghast, and the song " Lady Fuchsia " by another British band, Strawbs, is also based on events in the novels.

Gormenghast trilogy is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.

The Gormenghast fantasy trilogy is a trilogy by default, as author Mervyn Peake planned to write more novels set in that fictional world until his health failed.

* The novel Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake, best known for the Gormenghast series, is set on Sark.

Gormenghast is less focused on a central protagonist than many novels.

Gormenghast is a remote and reclusive earldom dominated by the huge Castle Gormenghast at its centre, and ruled by the noble family of Groan since time immemorial.

The kingdom derives its name from Gormenghast Mountain, and is isolated from the outside world by inhospitable regions on each side of it.

Gormenghast Mountain is said to be so large that from the castle it looks at most a few miles distant, whereas in fact it is a day's ride away on horseback.

Given that it is surrounded on three sides by watery regions, it is not implausible that the entire region can be flooded, as described in the second book Gormenghast.

Otherwise, the impression given is that Gormenghast is stagnant, insular, and introspective.

His desire for freedom is awakened by the sight of his foster sister, known only as " The Thing ", a feral child who lives in the woods of Gormenghast ( due to her mother being banished as an outcast ) and who terrorizes the Bright Carvers, the inhabitants of the mud dwellings outside the castle walls.

He is eventually exiled from Gormenghast for throwing one of the Countess's cats at Steerpike.

He is the one who coordinates the various arcane rituals that make up daily life in Gormenghast.

He is a consummate misanthrope who abuses and insults everybody he meets, and who cares only for the rigid application of the laws and traditions of Gormenghast.

Due to her illegitimacy she is an outcast who becomes a feral child living in the wilderness surrounding Gormenghast.

Ironically it is only Steerpike, the power hungry, psychopathic and devious rebel, who shares Titus ' contempt for the rules and traditions of Gormenghast.