Literature & Poetry

These humorous and polemical writings provide an invaluable introduction to Swift as a master satirist and pamphleteer.

Spurred by a lifelong fascination with the great emperor, French novelist Honore de Balzac set himself the painstaking task of collecting a selection of Napoleon's aphorisms from his public speeches and the gazettes of the time.

A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant even today.

A tongue-in-cheek manual on how servants should cope with the demands of their masters and perform their tasks in ways that will best satisfy their indolence, wastefulness and greed. It takes a caustic and irreverent look at master-servant relations.

De Quincey's seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.

A stunning hardback gift edition of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

A fresh translation of Vergil's Aeneid by a renowned classicist and scholar of Latin literature.

Swift's The Benefit of Farting argues eloquently, in a forceful a posteriori fashion, that most of the distempers thought to affect the fairer sex are due to flatulences not adequately vented.

Inspired by Gogol's surreal tales, Dostoevsky's hilarious story has been interpreted by some as a vitriolic piece of social criticism and a veiled attack on the revolutionary philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

This short collection shows Chekhov in an amusing, playful light, poking fun at the greed, sycophancy and ignorance of his characters, with the moral detachment that also characterizes his major, serious works.

The Decay of Lying sees Wilde explore his deepest preoccupations about the relationship between life and art, and examine the work of such writers as Shakespeare and Balzac.

A glorious exercise in cheeky punmanship, The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders sees Jonathan Swift in fine scatological form.

LITERARY STUDIES: FICTION, NOVELISTS & PROSE WRITERS. Robert McCrum chooses what he considers to be the 100 best novels chosen from the last 300 years of English language writing. First published in the Observer over a period of 2 years.

A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.

With his richly detailed world of Middle Earth and the epic tales he told around it, J.R.R. Tolkien invented the modern fantasy novel. For readers and students getting to grips with this world for the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Guide for the Perplexed is an essential guide to the author's life and ...

In this extended essay, Virginia Woolf embarks on a journey studying different educational experiences available to men and women. She explores the fact that women live in a patriarchal world and, if they are to write, must have a room of their own.

‘The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.’

In George Orwell’s first full-length work, a memoir in two parts, he recounts how he lived in two major cities as a struggling writer with very little money in his pocket.

From sleeping in bug-infested hotels to surviving ...

Over a quarter of a century ago Michael Meyer's three-volume biography provided the English-speaking world with its most comprehensive study of Ibsen's life and work. Robert Ferguson is deeply appreciative of Meyer, but he argues that Meyer, like other critics, was content to write about the public reputation ...

‘This is not a war … it is a comic opera with an occasional death.’

In this personal account of his time fighting for the POUM militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell details his life in the trenches and the lives of the men he fought alongside.

He also ...