The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain

On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life—and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and counterculture icon—the “laureate of American lowlife” (Time)—who stoically recorded society’s downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an...

The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their naivety, ludicrous single-mindedness and readiness for murder and destruction, might seem exaggerated - until we consider their all-too-recognisable descendants in the real world ever since. 

But as the money begins to fail, so does their marriage. Patch’s gradual descent into alcoholism, depression and alienation from his marriage ultimately lead to his ruin. Fitzgerald’s novel is a remorseless exploration of the horrors of an age of excess and lost innocence.

The Pickwickians meet to begin their first journey and get knocked about by an angry cabman, who thinks they are informers, while an angry crowd gathers. They are rescued by Alfred Jingle, who travels with them to Rochester. Jingle is an adventurer interested in wealthy women, and on this first trip he involves the innocent Winkle in a duel with Dr....

'It's a dreadful thing to yield...but resist now?Lay my pride bare to the blows of ruin?That's dreadful too.'

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...

Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

Spurred by his longing to escape, Winston rebels. He breaks the law by falling in love with Julia, and, as part of the clandestine organization the Brotherhood, they attempt the unimaginable – to bring down the Party.

Oscar Wilde’s only novel is the dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty.In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England.

From the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted.

Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.

Driven by his own ambition and that of his power-hungry wife, he murders King Duncan and seizes the throne for himself. Forced to commit murder again and again to maintain their grip on power, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become haunted by guilt and paranoia, falling into a spiral of madness and, eventually, death.

 One of the earliest and most vivid female narrators in the history of the English novel, Moll recounts her adventures with irresistible wit and candour—and enough guile that the reader is left uncertain whether she is ultimately a redeemed sinner or a successful opportunist.

With a bitter feud between their respective families, Romeo and Juliet’s love is troubled from the start, and through their relationship, Shakespeare shows the fine line between love, hatred, comedy and tragedy

It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.

Gilbert Markham becomes suspicious when he begins to hear these stories, however it is only when he reads Helen’s diary that he learns the full cruelty that her husband subjected her to in her previous life.