Every week for the last six years in The Independent on Sunday, award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been telling the story of world literature using illustrated limericks. Following the runaway success of the first volume of The Limerickiad in 2011, Volume II takes the story from John Donne to Jane Austen. Yet again Rowson manages to lower the tone – poking fun at Jacobean Tragedy, mangling all twelve books of Paradise Lost, and ridiculing the Romantics' flowery ways.

Click the 'Extracts' tab above for some sample illustrations from the book - we dare you not to chuckle!

Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work regularly appears in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. His books include graphic adaptations of The Waste Land (Penguin, 1990) and Gulliver's Travels (Atlantic, 2012). Among his other books are The Dog Allusion (Vintage, 2008), F*ck: The History of the World in 65 Incidents (Jonathan Cape, 2008) and Stuff (Vintage, 2008), a memoir longlisted for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in London.