In A Discourse on Inequality Rousseau sets out to demonstrate how the growth of civilization corrupts man’s natural happiness and...

The literary career of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spanned less than twenty years, but no area of intellectual inquiry was...

Rene Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he...

'Dickens's finest work in the genre of the detective story was his last' The Times

Edwin Drood is contracted to marry orphan...

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

A collection of the most famous cases faced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's peerless creation, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and...

When country-girl Grace Melbury returns home from her middle-class school she feels she has risen above her suitor, the simple...

'A revelation ... as well as being sympathetic to the plight of children, it is hilarious' A. N. Wilson

The hero of Dickens's...

Nietzsche's first published book, The Birth of Tragedy is a compelling argument for the necessity of art in life

This landmark...

When Connecticut mechanic and foreman Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious, he wakes not to the familiar scenes of...

Determined that her baby son Tom shall not share her fate and remain in slavery, Roxy secretly exchanges him with his playmate...

Originally published in 1823, The Pioneers is the first of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, and the one that incorporates...

Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its...

Matthew Lewis's Gothic masterpiece, depicting a holy man slowly becoming entangled in a web of sin, The Monk is edited with an...

One of the strangest novels ever written - part daydream, part diatribe and part autobiography - by one of the great eccentrics...

A rich and unforgettable tragic-comic novel of sexual intrigue and political scheming in nineteenth-century Spain
One of the...

'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.'

These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has stirred...

The most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source of Norse mythology

Written in Iceland...

With the emergence of democracy in the city-state of Athens in the years around 460 BC, public speaking became an essential skill...

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

An innovative novel featuring an astonishingly wicked female villain, Wilkie Collins's Armadale was regarded by T.S. Eliot as...

The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout...

'The best thing is to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! So, long live the underground!'
Alienated from society and paralysed...

A wonderful new selection of Henry James's short stories exploring the relationship between art and life, edited by Michael...

With its insightful portrayals of her protagonist's inner life, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was a hugely influential...

When Reverend Josiah Crawley, the impoverished curate of Hogglestock, is accused of theft it causes a public scandal, sending...

The first romantic historical novel and international bestseller, Waverley (1814) tells the story of Edward Waverley, a naive,...

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who...

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

This witty and amusing collection of short pieces shows Dickens liberated from the more formal and sustained demands of the novel...