It is in every way worthy of what one great woman should have written of another.' Patrick Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Brontë, and, having been invited...
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Ge...
He was of no consequence - he was flung aside, like a bit of trash, the carcass of some animal. It was horrible, horrible!' Upton Sinclair's searing novel follows the fortunes of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian who comes to America with his fiancée and family in search of a better life. What he ...
Yes, what is Dionysian? - This book provides an answer - "a man who knows" speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his god.' The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a book about the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its time. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy is the expressi...
All Hogglestock believed their parson to be innocent; but then all Hogglestock believed him to be mad.' Josiah Crawley lives with his family in the parish of Hogglestock, East Barsetshire, where he is perpetual curate. Impoverished like his parishioners, Crawley is hard-working and respected but he...
He thought it expedient and necessary that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and arms, in quest of adventures' Don Quixote, first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Qui...
You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.' John Bold has lost his heart to Eleanor Harding but he is a political radical who has launched a campaign against the management of the charity of which her father is ...
Three extraordinary characters caught in a web of fatal obsession are at the centre of Hugo's novel. The grotesque hunchback Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, owes his life to the austere archdeacon, Claude Frollo, who in turn is bound by a hopeless passion to the gypsy dancer Esmeralda. She, me...
Between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Törless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he ...
In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical s...
For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and dr...
As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream.'So begins one of the best-loved and most widely read books in English literature. ...
I have heard men say, that seeing is believing; but I should say that feeling is believing.' Anna Sewell's famous 'Autobiography of a Horse, published in 1877, is one of the bestselling novels in English. It was written not for children, but to expose and prevent cruelty to horses, and is a classic ...
The Water-Babies (1863) is one of the strangest and most powerful children's books ever published. Written by an Anglican clergyman with an insatiable love of science, the story combines an uplifting moral about redemption with a crash course in evolutionary theory, and has an imaginative exuberanc...
Harvey Cheyne is the over-indulged son of a millionaire. When he falls overboard from an ocean liner he is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and, initially against his will, joins the crew of the We're Here for a summer. Through the medium of an exciting adventure story, Captains Courageous (189...
One of France's best-selling writers at the time of the novel's composition, Dumas here combines what he considered to be life's essentials - `l'action et l'amour'. This historical romance is the climax of his epic of chivalry and valour that began with The Three Musketeers, and it is here that Atho...
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ' So begins one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. I...
She liked lies...To lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in a woman' Lizzie Eustace is young, beautiful, and widowed. Her determination to hold on to the Eustace family's diamond necklace in the face of legal har...
This classic study of the working life of a professional writer is one of the best - and also one of the strangest - autobiographies ever written. After a miserable childhood and misspent youth, Trollope turned his life around at the age of twenty-six. By 1860 the 'hobbledehoy' had become both a se...
Oceans feed us and affect our climate. With climate change, pollution, and overfishing, our oceans are at risk as never before. Yet we are only just learning their history and processes. Here, Zalasiewicz and Williams describe what we know of their origin and development on Earth, oceans on other pl...
The true story of Allied nursing in the First World War, offering a compelling account of nurses' wartime experiences and a clear appraisal of their work and its contribution to the Allied cause. ...
It is well recognized that those who go through a major trauma can go on to experience psychological problems. Many seek psychological help and there is a now a range of psychotherapies specifically for those who have been through trauma. In this authoritative book John Marzillier describes and ...
Have you ever wondered how it's possible to build a skyscraper, a big bridge, a jumbo jet, or a cruise liner? Everything has structure. Structure is the difference between a random pile of components and a fully functional object. Through structure the parts connect to make the whole. Natural ...
What is knowledge? How does it differ from mere belief? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream? Questions like these are ancient ones, and the branch of philosophy dedicated to answering them - episte...