Oscar Wilde's alluring novel of decadence and sin was a succes de scandale on publication. It follows Dorian Gray who, enthralled...

Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial...

A classic of Italian literature, this epic and unforgettable novel recounts one man's long and turbulent life in revolutionary...

Dark, desolate and fantastical, The Purple Cloud was a pioneer in the genre of apocalyptic novels, and the first great science...

Diogenes, Julian

A unique new volume illuminating the philosophy of the ancient Greek and Roman Cynics

From their founding in the fifth century...

For a generation adjusting painfully to the demands of a modern industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an...

The Book of the Dead is a unique collection of funerary texts from a wide variety of sources, dating from the fifteenth to the...

Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is arguably the greatest writer of modern China, and is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese...

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which...

Previously published as L'assommoir (The Dram Shop), Emile Zola's The Drinking Den is an unflinching study of a desperate young...

Set at the height of the "tulipomania" that gripped Holland in 17th century, this is the story of Cornelius van Baerle, a humble...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and...

The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories 1896-1904 is an enchanting collection of tales which showcase Anton Chekhov at the...

Icelandic literary culture was one of the richest and most important in the medieval world. Texts that were written in Iceland...

Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries...

Gerald of Wales was among the most dynamic and fascinating churchmen of the twelfth century. A member of one of the leading...

In The Marquise of O-, a virtuous widow finds herself unaccountably pregnant. And although the baffled Marquise has no idea when...

Guy de Maupassant's scandalous tale of an opportunistic young man corrupted by the allure of power, Bel-Ami is translated with an...

Also known as Journey to the West, Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey is one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature,...

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

'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding'

Dickens's story of...

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

Published in 1886, The Bostonians begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer in search of a...

'The noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers ... ethically he is supreme' Bertrand Russell

Published shortly after...

Villette is Charlotte Bronte's powerful autobiographical novel of one woman's search for true love, edited with an introduction...

Originally delivered in the form of lectures at Glasgow, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations Books I-III laid the foundations of...

A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully...

'... ever-present, phantom thing;
My slave, my comrade, and my king'
Some of Emily Bronte's most extraordinary...

'It's coming - the postponeless Creature' Electrifying poems of isolation, beauty, death and eternity from a reclusive genius and...

Lewis Carroll's anarchic, disturbing and boisterously funny Alice stories, conjured
up one afternoon to entertain a young girl,...