A bloody struggle for control, hundreds of characters and magnificent castles set in a fantasy land come alive in your living room thanks to Game Of Thrones.

AFTER working in the television industry for a decade in the 1980s (on the remake of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Beauty And The Beast and a few other pilot episodes), George R.R. Martin had enough of it. Although he was successful in his own right with television, Martin found his imagination often constricted by a thing called the budget. This meant he usually ended up cutting right down to the bone all the good stuff that was in his first draft, arriving at a lean sixth revision.