Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective...

Plutarch's vivid and engaging portraits of the Spartans and their customs are a major source of our knowledge about the rise and...

A moving love story and a vivid depiction of Berlin in the 1870s, from Germany's greatest nineteenth-century novelist Theodor...

Charles Darwin's seminal formulation of the theory of Evolution, On the Origin of Species continues to be as controversial today...

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to...

Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko...

Throughout his life George Orwell aimed, in his words, to make 'political writing into an art'. This collection brings together...

The powerful writings collected together in this volume chronicle George Orwell's first-hand experiences of life among the...

George Orwell's experience of the Spanish Civil War had a transformative effect on his life and work. This volume brings together...

Much of George Orwell's best writing, brought together in this collection, is concerned with his complex, often contradictory...

A soldier of great standing and a newly married man, Othello seems to be in an enviable position. And yet, when his supposed...

'The great poet of the city. He was created by London' Peter Ackroyd

Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old...

Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an...

A new Penguin edition of Ibsen's two great verse plays, in masterful versions by one of our greatest living poets, Geoffrey...

Pericles was Shakespeare's first full-blown tragicomedy, the precursor to The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and one...

Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few...

Andrei Bely's Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist...

In the fourth of the 'Palliser' stories, Trollope follows Phineas Finn's return to the dangerous world of Westminster politics....

'When Dickens has described something you see it for the rest of your life' George Orwell

In 1844, Charles Dickens took a...

'Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck,...

Five masterful dramatic works from one of the world's best-loved playwrights, including The Seagull-now a major motion picture...

One of Bernard Shaw’s most glittering comedies, Arms and the Man is a burlesque of Victorian attitudes to heroism, war and...

With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences' complacency and exposed social evils through his...

Poet's Pub is the classic comic novel by Eric Linklater, set in an English pub. When an Oxford poet named Saturday Keith assumes...

With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early...

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval...

Austen's most popular novel, the unforgettable story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Nominated as one of America's best-loved...

One of the key works in the nineteenth-century battle between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology...

One of the greatest British philosophers, Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) was the founder of the influential doctrine of...

Exploring the question of what exactly makes good people good, Protagoras and Meno are two of the most enjoyable and accessible...