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The Wisdom of Father Brown
This is the second of five books of short stories about G. K. Chesterton’s fictional detective, first published in 1914. Father Brown is a s…
The Diary of a Nobody
The Diary of a Nobody is the fictitious record of fifteen months in the life of Charles Pooter, his family, friends and small circle of acqu…
Queen Lucia
E. F. Benson was born at Wellington College in Berkshire, where his father, who later went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, was th…
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…
The Vicar of Wakefield
Published in 1766, 'The Vicar of Wakefield' was Oliver Goldsmith's only novel. It was thought to have been sold to the publisher for £…
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…
Crome Yellow
Crome Yellow, published in 1921 was Aldous Huxley’s first novel. In it he satirizes the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story…
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…
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 …
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, …
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 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…
Oscar Wilde
Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" t…
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…
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 …