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....

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the...

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 spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period and the crowning achievement of that caustic,...

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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,...

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...

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’,...

'America was never innocent.'

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