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....

The language of flowers is as old as language itself. In the earliest poetry familiar plants were used to represent simple...

On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the...

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...

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) is one of the towering figures of world culture, a universal man whose extraordinary...

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation....

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

For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them— and poets have...

Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in 1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17...

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This is a Man describes his deportation to...

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...

'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it....

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun...

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...

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds...

Tacitus was the greatest historian of the Roman empire. Born in about AD 55, he served as administrator and leading senator. This...

Johnson... , Boswell...

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...

This anthology contains a cross-section covering his career, including such legendary songs as 'Suzanne', 'Sisters of Mercy',...

Scott... , Buchan...

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,...

With his "counter-novel" Hopscotch and his unforgettable short stories, Julio Cortazar earned a place among the most innovative...

Naguib Mahfouz’s magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time.

The Nobel...

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

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the Times as 'a...

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