The Earl of Marshmoreton's lively daughter – the damsel of the title – thinks she is in love with one Geoffrey Raymond, but a...

One of Hemingway’s finest novels, A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929 when the author was at the height of his powers. It...

Want to know how to lose a golf tournament, a good job or a Fat Uncles sweepstake? Destroy the wrong Old Master painting in the...

In this comic novel - dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the stage version - Jimmy Pitt, man-about-town and former...

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

Johnson... , Boswell...

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

A Passage to India, published in 1924 and set in British India in the years immediately preceding, is a powerful critique of both...

When Lord Emsworth's delectable solitude at Blandings Castle is shattered by the arrival from America of his bossy sister,...

The uncle of the title is a mysterious stranger who arrives at Beckford College and turns out to be younger than his nephew,...

Turgenev's first literary masterpiece was an eloquent evocation of rural Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. A hunter wanders...

This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the...

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

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made...

In 1914 Paul Baumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a...

A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, Animal Farm is perhaps the most...

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery...

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

Zbigniew... , Keats John

Painting and sculpture have inspired great poetry, but so also have photography, calligraphy, tapestry and folk art. Included...

On doctor's orders, Bertie Wooster retires to the village of Maiden Eggesford but his rest-cure is interrupted by Aunt Dahlia who...

Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers –...

Byatt A.... , Готорн...

As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence...

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

Philip Hensher’s selection of stories reflects the ‘desperate modernity’ of Berlin as it make and remakes itself over a period of...

T. Paterson Frisby, the dyspeptic American financier, loves every cent of his twenty million dollars. Lady Vera Mace loves T....

When Bill West of New York falls in love with the statuesque Alice Coker, his promise to look after her dissipated brother Judson...

Described on the title-page of the first edition as 'the autobiography of her horse, translated from the original equine', Black...

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of...

Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens’s finest achievements, Bleak House...

Wodehouse... , Bolton Guy

Despite an enormous solo output, P. G. Wodehouse often co-operated with other writers, especially in the early stages of his...

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