CLASSICS

Evelyn Waugh's hilarious debut novel, with an introduction by Barbara CookeSent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of...

"Backgrounds" begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulkner's letters, excerpts...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since' Paul...

Great Expectations will form the centrepiece of the Dickens season this Christmas.Part thriller, part mystery, with a powerful love story at its heart, Sarah Phelps's (Oliver Twist, EastEnders) three-part adaptation...

Oscar Wilde's audacious drama of social scandal centres around the revelation of Mrs Arbuthnot's long-concealed secret. A house party is in full swing at Lady Hunstanton's country home, when it...

Anne of Avonlea continues Anne's story. Now half-past sixteen but as strong-headed and romantic as ever, Anne becomes a teacher at her old school and dreams of its improvement. But...

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our...

'... the shadow turned round; and I saw a terrible death's-head, which darted a look at me from a pair of scorching eyes. I felt as if I were face...

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,...

Through the Looking-Glass the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, containing the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language,...

The Brothers Grimm rediscovered a host of fairy tales, telling of princes and princesses in their castles, witches in their towers and forests, of giants and dwarfs, of fabulous animals...

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she...

Othello has long been recognised as one of the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. This is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the...

Japanese no theatre or the drama of 'perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance,...

These three stories of Tolstoy's maturity show him increasingly grappling with fundamental issues of religion and morality. In "Master and Man", he depicts an employer, bent on closing a business...

In January 1850 Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House...

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this...

Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a hare lip -- her 'precious bane'. Cursed for...

Good Friday, 1939, and T., a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, arrives at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The museum is closed, but T. manages to slip in, and it would appear that...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.' Orphaned and sent to live with her uncle...