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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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

A dazzling collection of early stories and later fragments which throw an entirely new light on Jane Austen. In particular, they...

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...

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry...

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