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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

The fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off his native Chicago in the spirit of a...

In the comic masterpiece which established him one of the greatest writers in the English language, Naipaul follows the fortunes...

When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have...

George Eliot's last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who...

This novel renews the Victorian family saga in a modern setting, tracing the history of the Brangwens through several...

Set in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad spent much of his youth as an officer in the British Merchant Navy, Victory is a...

When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his...

Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, an ordinary man struggling against the overwhelming power of a...

In The Return of the Native Hardy once more treats his favourite theme of the mismatched couple with masterly pathos and...

Hardy’s last novel is the story of a young working man destroyed by the partial fulfilment of his dreams. Torn between his...

In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot recreates her own childhood through the story of the wild, gifted Maggie Tulliver and her...

The most swiftly-moving and unified of Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is famous for its re-creation of the London...

The exhilaration that comes from reading Adam Bede owes its existence to the fact that on every page George Eliot seems absorbed...

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and...