(Hardback)

From the author of MIDDLEMARCH and SILAS MARNER, a story of frustrated intelligence and longing, featuring the intelligent Maggie, who yearns to be loved, and her brother Tom, who is forced to study. When Maggie is cast out by Tom, she is ostracized by society, and must face the consequences of renunciation.

(Hardback)

The moonstone is a yellow diamond of unearthly beauty brought from India and given to Rachel Verrinder as an eighteenth birthday present, but the fabled diamond carries with it a terrible curse.

(Hardback)

And while seeming to smile on the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, he is, in fact, consumed by jealousy, driven to terrify the boy's fiance and to plot the murder of Edwin himself.

(Hardback)

The single most important book in the history of all Christian literature is presented here in the Authorized Version which has exerted such a profound influence on both spiritual life and the literary production of English-speaking cultures.

(Hardback)

The humour of the shop and the pilgrimage counterbalance the tragic and sentimental story of Little Nell. A Disney production of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP has recently finished shotting in Ireland, starring James Fox, Peter Ustinov, and Tom Courtenay.

(Hardback)

The King James Bible of 1611 has been one of the richest sources for English language and literature for nearly four centuries and is itself a work of the greatest poetic beauty. George Steiner's introduction illuminates the Bible's profound effect on the history of English literature and includes a moving personal reading of the greatest of texts.

(Hardback)

One of the founding documents of Western culture and the only surviving ancient Greek trilogy, this is one of the great tragedies of all time. The three plays portray the bloody events that follow the victorious return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War.
Contains Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides

(Hardback)

When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have suspected that this journeyman task was to turn in to one of the great comic novels in English literature.

(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.

(Hardback)

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.

(Hardback)

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)

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)

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

(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)

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)

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.