(Hardback)

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.

(Hardback)

In order to save his reputation and the honour of his house at school after he shames himself by running away from a fight between fellow pupils and toughs from the local town, a studious schoolboy takes up the study of boxing. The simple tale is given sparkle by vivid character drawing and the authors sharp ear for schoolboy dialogue

(Hardback)

' The author invited Arthur Rackham to illustrate his book, but Rackham said he was too busy - a decision he was happily able to reconsider in 1936 when he was approached by the American publisher of the Limited Editions Club.

(Hardback)

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".

(Hardback)

Frank Baum set out to write 'a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nighmares are left out'.

(Paperback)

(Hardback)

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality.

(Hardback)

The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own destruction.

(Hardback)

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America.

(Hardback)

These some three hundred poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907)-an age in which poetry and the arts flourished-were gathered in the eighteenth century into what became one of the best-known books in the world, and which is still cherished in Chinese homes everywhere.

(Hardback)

This is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the passage of time and seeking to recapture meaning from the flux of things. Though Mrs Ramsay's death is the event on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory.

(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.

(Hardback)

In this volume, Tony Tanner introduces Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies - "Hamlet", "Othello", "Macbeth" and "King Lear".

(Hardback)

Volume 1 of the new Everyman Shakespeare, published in 1992, included the four major tragedies: HAMLET, KING LEAR, OTHELLO and MACBETH.

(Hardback)

Stevenson's great adventure story, set in the 18th century, was conceived in the Scottish Highlands, where the author and his 12-year-old stepson amused themselves by making a map that showed the location of buried treasure on an island. The illustrations first appeared in 1949.

(Hardback)

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.

(Hardback)

Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland in the aftermath of World War I in order to meet his fiancee Angela in a remote seaside hotel owned by her father. Angela dies unexpectedly, but Archer remains in Kilnalough, captivated by the Majestic and its inhabitants, and seemingly unaware of the approaching political storm.

(Hardback)

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)

If Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge had a fiver for every dodgy scheme he has ever floated, he would be a rich man indeed.

(Hardback)

James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience

(Hardback)

Although the story of Uncle Dynamite concerns Bill Oakshott's struggle to find ways of getting his girl while financing his inheritance at Ashenden Manor, the real hero of the book is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham.

(Hardback)

Pongo Twistleton is in a state of financial embarrassment, again. Uncle Fred, meanwhile, has been asked by Lord Emsworth to foil a plot to steal the Empress, his prize pig. Along with Polly Pott (daughter of old Mustard), they form a deputation to Blandings Castle, bent on doing a "bit of good".