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 ...
Black Beauty is a perennial children's favourite, one which has never been out of print since its publication in 1877. It is a moralistic tale of the life of the horse related in the form of an aut...
'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...
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...
Adam Smith (1723-1790) was one of the brightest stars of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was his most important book. F...
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...
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...
The two American classics here together in one volume, Little Men and Jo's Boys, are worthy sequels to Little Women, one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, and its continuation, Good...
When Jerry, Jimmy and Cathy discover a tunnel that leads to a castle, they pretend that it is enchanted. But when they discover a Sleeping Princess at the centre of a maze, astonishing ...
Life in the March household is full of adventures and accidents as the four very different March sisters follow their varying paths to adulthood, always maintaining the special bond between them. S...
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge...