CLASSICS

Major General Sir Richard Hannay is the fictional secret agent created by writer and diplomat John Buchan, who was himself an Intelligence officer during the First World War. The strong...

FinnegansWake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle andtheir family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well asall...

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading.This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, the only child of wealthy parents, whose journey from adolescence...

With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.Tender is the Night is a story set in the hedonistic high society...

With an introduction by Charlotte R. Brown and William Edward Morris.David Hume (1711-1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English, as well as a master stylist. This...

A Room of One's Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf's best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel....

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the...

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers...

'His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonised horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already...

Sigmund Freud's controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. The 'Freudian slip', the 'Oedipus complex', 'childhood sexuality', 'libido', 'narcissism' 'penis envy', the 'castration...

With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager.This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at...

In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the...

Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818,...

'The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, rat-like, scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can...

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial,...

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being...

Translated by Constance GarnettNotes and Introductions by David Rampton, Department of English, University of OttawaGogol's works constitute one of Russian literature's supreme achievements, yet the nature of their brilliant originality,...

This revised and expanded second edition brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Of the fifty-four stories in the present volume,...

With an Introduction by Dr Richard Serjeantson, Trinity College, CambridgeSince its first publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has been recognised as one of the most compelling, and most controversial,...

In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Emily Alder, Lecturer in Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain,...

With an Introduction and Notes by Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University and the author of Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de Siecle-Literary Scene.At...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University.In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which...

Little Women is one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, based on the author's own youthful experiences. It describes the family life of the four March sisters living...

A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony:...

The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book's brevity....

Little Women is one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, based on the author's own youthful experiences. It describes the family of the four March sisters living in...

Mary Lennox was horrid. Selfish and spoilt, she was sent to stay with her hunchback uncle in Yorkshire. She hated it.But when she finds the way into a secret garden...

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury.Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen and the...

A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony:...

Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat, Mole, Badger and the preposterous Mr Toad (with his 'Poop-poop-poop'...

The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents,...

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of...

When Father goes away with two strangers one evening, the lives of Roberta, Peter and Phyllis are shattered. They and their mother have to move from their comfortable London home...

The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book's brevity....

Black Beauty is a perennial children's favourite, one which has never been out of print since its publication in 1877. It is a moralistic tale of the life of the...

Treasure Island is the seminal pirates and buried treasure novel, which is so brilliantly concocted that it appeals to readers both young and old. The story is told in the...

The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never...

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an...

Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has...

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff...

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the 'Jazz Age'.Through the narration...

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an...

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny...

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen...

What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of...