(Hardback)

A leader of the twentieth-century Irish nationalist movement, who eventually became one of the Free States's senators, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is also the greatest poet that nation has yet produced.

(Hardback)

The talented and beautiful Isabel Archer, courted by several suitors and enriched by her dying uncle, chooses to marry the cold and ambitious Gilbert Osmond. The heroine soon discovers to her cost that freedom of choice is never what it seems.

(Hardback)

Born in 1469, Niccolo Machiavelli undertook diplomatic missions to various courts, before his imprisonment and exile. To quote his own words, this book discusses "what a principality is, what kinds there are, how they can be acquired, how they can be kept and why they are lost".

(Hardback)

When a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for The Princess Casamassima in which Henry James explores the London underworld and the political unrest seething there in the later nineteenth century.

(Hardback)

Edith Wharton's subtle variation on the theme of the eternal triangle features Anna Leath, a rich American widow living in France; and the first love of Anna's youth, George Darrow, who has come back into her life. Hoping to be reunited with George, Anna finds the path of love does not run smooth.

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Although Plato's celebrated work of philosophy describes a society which to some seems the ideal human community and to others like a totalitarian nightmare, it also raises enduring questions about politics, art, education and the general conduct of life.

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Wild passion leads to tragedy as love is perverted by marriage. But the concerns of mortals are belittled by the sombre, immemorial presence of Egdon Heath, perhaps Hardy's finest evocation of his native landscape. The text is accompanied by a critical introduction.

(Hardback)

Though an Englishman by birth, he reacted violently against the political order of eighteenth-century England and in favour of radical reform. RIGHTS OF MAN and COMMON SENSE are the two short books in which he elaborates his political and social theories in vivid, simple prose which can still be read with pleasure and excitement today.

(Hardback)

This is the only novel that Conrad set in London, and it communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894. Verloc, (a Russian spy who is also working for the police) is ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho.

(Hardback)

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT is one of three most influential treatises ever written (the others being PLato's REPUBLIC and Marx's DAS KAPITAL) Of the three it is safe to say that only THE SOCIAL CONTRACT is much read in its entirety today, and it continues to exert a direct influence on contemporary political thought.

(Hardback)

Primarily known as a dramatist, Chekhov also wrote short stories. This selection of his work includes "The Swedish Match", "Easter Eve", "Mire", "On the Road", "Verotchka", "Volodya", "The Kiss", "Sleepy" and "The Steppe".

(Hardback)

This is the prose masterpiece of the Heian era of the 10th and 11th centuries, which is recognized as a great period in Japanese literature. It is an account of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture which made such a masterpiece possible.

(Hardback)

Ancient Athens produced three great tragic writers - Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Of the three Sophocles has in many ways remained the most accessible and may have had the most extensive influence on Western Culture, not least because Freud took from the Theban Plays the name and the idea of the Oedipus complex.

(Hardback)

Interwoven amongst them are vivid fictionalized portraits of major historical figures, amongst them the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu, the weak and ineffectual Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, his unhappy Spanish queen.

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Features an inventor who travels to the remote future where he finds both love and terror.

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Ernest Pontifex, son of a bullying clergyman, leads a life of disarray. Ernest struggles with orthodoxy, lives in the slums, is thrown into prison, and marries the vulgar Ellen. Saved by the discovery that Ellen is already married, Ernest receives an inheritance, and is able to devote his life to literature, finally winning some success.

(Hardback)

Published in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history.

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Wilkie Collins' sixth novel took the fashionable world by storm on its appearance in 1860, when everything from dances to dresses was named after the "woman in white". Nicholas Rance is the author of "Historical Novel and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England".

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Hardy described the theme of THE WOODLANDERS as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation'. The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the launch of the Channel 4 Film starring Rufus Sewell, Polly Walker, Tony Haygarth and Emily Woolfe, directed by Phil Agland.

(Hardback)

Henry Fielding's 18th century classic regales the story of Tom Jones and his longing for Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighbouring squire.

(Hardback)

Though now enshrined as major masterpieces of American literature, Twain's classic tales of childhood remain as fresh as when they were first written. Vivid and funny, the stories chronicle journeys from innocence to experience in which innocence is preserved.

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A mock autobiography, in which the hero wrestles with the impossibility of explaining anything without explaining everything. In the process he explores every conceivable fictional device in a brilliant display of narrative fireworks.

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In these three sea stories, based on his own experience, Conrad invests his portraits of mundane steamers and their crews with epic qualities of fortitude and courage in the face of overwhelming natural odds.

(Hardback)

Published in 1851, Harriet Beecher-Stowe's novel rapidly became world-famous and remained so. A didactic and sentimental drama set among the slaves of the American South, Uncle Tom's Cabin is nevertheless a lively and forceful story. Given the history of race relations in our time it remains relevant even today.