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The Man Who Knew Too Much
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an influential and prolific English writer of the early 20th century. He was a journalist, a poet a…
Tales of the Five Towns
This is a selection of short stories recounting, with gentle satire and tolerant good humour, the small town provincial life at the end of t…
Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures
Douglas William Jerrold (1803-1857) was the son of an actor manager. After some time in the Navy and as an apprentice printer he became a pl…
On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery
Joseph Lister was born near London in 1827. He studied medicine at the University of London and pursued a career as a surgeon in Scotland. H…
A Personal Anthology of Shakespeare
This personal anthology is my choice of speeches from Shakespeare that I enjoy reading (that I would like to have had by heart years ago!) a…
On A Note Of Triumph
On June 6, 1944, as D-Day unfolded, the Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned Norman Corwin to create a radio show to celebrate a potent…
The Idiot
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Ru…
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype - the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet no…
First Love
The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, …
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
In this enchanting fable (subtitled The Choice of Life), Rasselas and his retinue burrow their way out of the totalitarian paradise of the H…
The Soul of Man
“(T)he past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”Published originally …
An Essay on Man
Pope’s Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind’s place in th…
Confessions
“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.”Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most re…
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memori…
Phaedrus
“For there is no light of justice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them: they…
Confessions
“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.”Here again is …
Oscar Wilde
Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" t…
Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
“Extreme busyness…is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal …
Against The Grain
Against The Grain is a provocative exploration of aestheticism and the complexities of modern existence, penned by Joris-Karl Huysmans. This…
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
After the bizarre textual antics of "Tristram Shandy", this book would seem to require a literary health warning. Sure enough, it …