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....

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...

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....

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...

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,...

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

Johnson... , Босуэлл...

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

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and...

Hugo's grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo,...

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...

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

Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but...

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for...

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the...

At the end of the Great War, Andreas Pum has lost a leg but at least he has a medal and a barrel-organ which he plays on the...

Nancy Mitford modelled the characters in her best-known novels on her own unconventional (and at the time of writing, notorious)...

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the...

During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including ‘Boule de Suif’, ‘The Necklace’,...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism....

'America was never innocent.'

Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his...

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not...