Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain that was delivered in what the author described as a 'miraculous …
'To die will be an awfully big adventure.' Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children's literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a …
'It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them...' Hunger is the first-person story of a …
The pride o' a' our Scottish plain; Thou gi'es us joy to hear thy strain, (Janet Little, 'An Epistle to Mr Robert Burns') The 18th century saw Scotland become one of the leading …
'The old woman opened the door, and the next moment I was in the presence of Uncle Silas.' In Victorian Derbyshire, 17 year old orphan and heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to live at …
'The war went on; life went on; Paris went on.' In A Son at the Front, her only novel dealing with World War I, Edith Wharton offers a vivid portrait of American expatriate life in …
'I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever …
'Live now and listen, do not wait in vain Until tomorrow; pluck life's rose today.' Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard are two of the major sixteenth-century French poets and …
'The memory of a particular image is only regret for a particular moment...' The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most …
'Who would you say knows himself?' In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death. Like Plato, an …
