Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly......
'When I decide to escape I shall want nobody’s assistance.’ In this thrilling collection, we meet Arsene Lupin, a brilliant, alluring master of disguise –...
‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity...
During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. In Jane Austen’s breezy and entirely biased telling of English history, Mary,...
Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on...
‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday...
Composed in Iceland in the 13th Century, The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandanavian literature, taking readers on a voyage...
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . .. In this glittering new selection of Fitzgerald’s short...
London is under threat. It has become a haven for political exiles and anarchists. Frequent bomb threats and disturbances interrupt the lives of the city's...
'What does love fear? Limitation.'Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not...
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know, it was too subtle and...
May 1914. Britain is on the eve of war with Germany. Richard Hannay is living a quiet life in London, but after a chance encounter...
The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution...
‘Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it...
On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride...
'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him'His inheritance squandered...
Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: ‘a narrative meditation studying a hen, a...
I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves....
‘Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.’From intimate musings on his...
‘I must die. But must I die bawling?’What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In...