It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it doesn't all that often have villains, in the sense of coal-black embodiments of the principle of evil. And even when it does, it's not always so easy to tell who they are. Is God the baddie, or Satan? Ahab, or the white whale?

Yet even writers as subtle as Vladimir Nabokov have spiced their work with a fiend or two. And here they are, in a literary rogues' gallery.

These are the best of the worst: bloodsuckers, pederasts, cannibals, Old Etonians...the dastardliest dastards ever to have lashed damsel to track and waited for a through train. (SL)

Compiled by Toby Clements, Christopher Howse, Jake Kerridge, Sam Leith, Tim Martin, Sinclair McKay, Andrew McKie, Sophie Missing, Tom Payne, Ceri Radford and Sameer Rahim