This is a small book – as small as some of the books which are its subject-matter – but, in the way of fairy tales, it is bigger on the inside than the outside: start reading it, and you are immediately in the company of Oscar Wilde’s mother, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Jean Cocteau, Italo Calvino, Keats and Matthew Bourne. Fairy tales are all around us, it turns out; literally inspiring us with warnings and offering answers to life’s tricky questions.There have been a good many earnest dissections of fairy tales; Marina Warner has a 13-page bibliography at the back of her little book, which goes from W.H. Auden to Jack Zipes, by way of five works of her own, so she is amply qualified to light the way for us through the Grimm and thorny woo