Madame du Deffand and the Idiots, Javier Marias

How did the leopard get its spots? Why do the tides ebb and flow? How did the elephant get its trunk? And how was the alphabet made?

Simenon explores the complexity of parent child relationships and the bitterness of things left unsaid in this stark, confessional piece.

It is through their shared experiences of love that both sisters come to learn that the key to a successful match comes from finding the perfect mixture of rationality and feeling.

 The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant...

When a sudden collision rips a hole in the ship’s hull, the ferry sinks like a stone, throwing the literary critic into the icy harbor. Rescued by the Ghost, a seal-hunting vessel, van Weyden counts his blessings. Little does he know he’s boarded a ship bound straight for hell.

From a child coming to terms with the death of a priest to a young woman torn between leading an uneventful life in Dublin and fleeing Ireland with her lover, these fifteen stories bring to life the day-to-day existence of ordinary Dubliners in the early years of the twentieth century. 

1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State – with no hope of ever seeing them again – and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853.

Self-celebrating and self-mocking autobiographical writings from Ecce Homo, the last work iconoclastic German philosopher Nietzsche wrote before his descent into madness.

‘Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.’

The Mill on the Floss, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.

King Henry IV’s son, Prince Harry is quick-witted yet idle and irresponsible and lives a roguish existence keeping dubious company.

The epic poem The Iliad begins nine years after the beginning of the Trojan War and describes the great warrior Achiles and the battkes and events that take place as he quarrels with the King Agamemnon.

When four young lovers flee from Athens and become lost in an enchanted wood, they stumble into a fairy world where King Oberon, and Queen Titania, are feuding over ownership of a young Indian prince. 

A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. 

'Back, away from here, drowned people, go. I haven't stolen anyone's place'

Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have spotted the playwright’s attempts to use the shift from republican to imperial Rome to highlight the political situation of the Elizabethans at the time. Featuring some of the most powerfully resonant and rousing speeches of any of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar remains one of his most well-loved historical...