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It explains clearly all the references in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to south-east China.

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The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies.

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A romantic story with descriptions of working people and their lives, as the author encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has the power to involve the reader in the lives of Elizabeth Gaskell's characters.

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The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (AD 121-180) embodied in his person that ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His "Meditations" reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality and a spirit attuned to the particulars of human destiny.

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Together with Voltaire, Diderot was a remarkable figure of the French Enlightenment, as a philosopher, journalist and novelist. In this book, a young girl's enforced enclosure in a convent gives Diderot the chance to explore themes such as religious hypocrisy and sexual repression.

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Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

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A story of the war between man and mammal, in which the author explores his obsessions with good and evil, love and solitude, speech and silence, using his technical knowledge of sailing and the sea to tell a story which is at once minutely realistic and powerfully symbolic.

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This is the spirited story of a survivor whose racy anecdotes and shady dealings only underline her essential warmth and goodness. But there is nothing sentimental about Moll, who presents herself warts and all. Though her adventures take her abroad, she remains the vivid creation of London.

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This second volume of Chekhov's stories draws from his work of the 1880s and 90s and comprises "A Daughter of Albion", "An Incident", "A Dreary Story", "The Duel", "The Chorus Girl", "Ward 6", "The Teacher of Literature", "An Artist's Story", "My Life", "The Darling" and "The Lady with the Dog".

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Bursting with energy and populated by a whole world of inimitable and memorable characters - including especially the theatrical troupe with whom Nicholas performs - the book is both a griping story and a series of magnificent scenes.

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Portraying social life in fashionable Bath and centred around Catherine Morland, this novel ridicules the popular tales of romance and terror and contrasts with these the normal realities of life.

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Conrad's foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest novel, Nostromo - though over one hundred years old - says as much about today's Latin America as any of the finest recent accounts of that region's turbulent political life.

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In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. As a member of the nobility he had been despised by his fellow prisoners, most of whom were peasants - an experience shared in the book by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who has killed his wife.

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Goncharov's gentle satire on the failings of 19th-century Russian gentry and bureaucracy turns into something deeper and richer than satire, as he probes the character of a protagonist whose constitutional lethargy becomes a symbol for the malaise of the human spirit in an alienating world.

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In this novel of obsessive passion the author tells stories of Old Goriot and the ungrateful daughters he adores; young Rastignac, a country lad determined to make his way in Paris; and Vautrin, his satanic tempter. Their lives all cross in the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris.

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ON WAR is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work's first appearance in 1832 it has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soilders statemen, and intellectuals from Marx and Bismarck to Raymond Aron.

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When the eminent naturalist Charles Darwin returned from South America on board the H.M.S Beagle in 1836, he brought with him the notes and evidence which would form the basis of his landmark theory of evolution of species by a process of natural selection.

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In the second volume from Trollopes series of six Palliser novels, we probe deep into the life of British politics.

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Brillat - Savarin's unique, exuberant collection of dishes, experiences, reflections, history and philosophy raised gastronomy to an art form.

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Famed as a wit and bon viveur, Oscar Wilde lived up to his reputation. This selection of plays, poems and prose writings, introduced by Terry Eagleton, includes "The Importance of Being Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The Critic as an Artist" and "Apologia".

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John Keats began writing at the age of 18, and by the time he died, seven years later in 1821, he had produced a substantial number of poems. This collection contains his work - his narratives, sonnets of discovery and his six odes - and culminates in "To Autumn".

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Coleridge is the most complex and brilliant, yet the most elusive and intense of the great Romantic writers. It also reveals that behind the glittering surface of familiar masterpieces The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, the Biographia there is a great but unknown poet still waiting to be discovered.

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This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other.