The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of...

Possibly the most colourful figure in the history of Western music, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was certainly the most eloquent....

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the...

This wide-ranging anthology pays tribute to fathers young and old. At one end of the spectrum, a touching story by Ann Packer...

The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual centre of the western world. The writers collected here range from the...

From Li Bai's 'Bring in the Ale' to Ted Kooser's 'Beer Bottle'; from Robert Burns's' John Barleycorn' to Carol Ann Duffy's 'John...

The spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period and the crowning achievement of that caustic,...

Given that insects vastly outnumber us (there are approximately 200 million insects for every human) it is no surprise that there...

Johnson... , Босуэлл...

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in...

Although E. Nesbit regarded her poetry as her most important work, it is her children's books (written 'to keep the house going')...

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and...

Scott... , Бакен Джон

Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from a richly literary land, where the short story has flourished for over two...

Hugo's grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo,...

Describing his collection of Essays as ‘a book consubstantial with its author’, Montaigne identified both the power and the charm...

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge...

Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but...

Theocritus, Вергилий...

Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily,...

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for...

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the...

Originally published as a serial in the children's monthly magazine St Nicholas, Little Lord Fauntleroy was Frances Hodgson...

Barrie's classic tale of the boy who wouldn't grow up. It started life as a series of stories made up for the five Llewelyn...

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales originally appeared in batches each Christmas in the mid-19th century, and Spink's English...

Everyone knows Pinocchio, the walking, talking wooden puppet carved from a table leg. Pinocchio, an endearing scamp, is always...

‘Am dining at Goldini’s Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a...

It is the autobiography of Giorgio Bassani, told in a time span of around 15 years, a time where the ambiguous and mysterious...

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a...

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the...

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a...

Hardy described the theme of The Woodlanders as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their...

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a...