'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' declares Doctor Moreau to ha...
The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book's brevity. Written and published first by Antoine de St-E...
Lively and mischievous, idle and brave, Tom Brown is both the typical boy of his time and the perennial hero celebrated by authors as diverse as Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones) and Alec W...
Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining.Why did Pheidippides run the 26...
Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation.Rat, Mole, Badger and the preposterous Mr Toad, have brought del...
With an Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University, Ontario, Canada. This edition includes both Volumes One and Two.Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the develop...
Charles Darwin's travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty and sublimity which language coul...
In this selection of tales by the master folklorist Andrew Lang, the reader is taken into the romantic world of the gallant Knights of the Round Table and their courageous and chivalrous deeds, fai...
Horrific, horrendous, unspeakable, The Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, stalked the streets of East London in 1888, slaughtering prostitutes and bewildering the police who were hunting him. T...
Sigmund Freud's audacious masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, has never ceased to stimulate controversy since its publication in 1900.Freud is acknowledged as the founder of psyc...
When fifteen-year-old orphan John Trenchard is banished by his Aunt Jane, he goes to live at the local inn with the mysterious Elzevir Block, whose son has been killed by Customs Officers. Unoffici...
During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was serva...
David Hume (1711–1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English, as well as a master stylist. This volume contains his major philosophical works. A Treatise of Human Nature...
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet 'Divine' was added by later admirers) in exile from his ...
In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking...
Frances Burnett Hodgson's novel The Secret Garden is both intriguing and uplifting. It is regarded as one of the best children’s books written in the twentieth century.Mary Lennox...
Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his...
Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging b...
A Room of One's Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf's best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place ...
The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship...