"He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention." Pride and Prejudice , one of the most famous love stories of all time, has also proven itself as a treasured …
'I cannot be killed indoors,' he said, 'nor out of doors; I cannot be killed on horseback, nor on foot.' 'Well,' she said, 'how can you be killed?' Celtic mythology, Arthurian …
'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all through it' Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the …
'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent …
In the stories in this volume Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality and also his own ambiguous attitude to utopianism, themes central to many of …
Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor …
'And low, stole o'er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep' In Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin, an innkeeper and his family are sleeping. Around them and their dreams there swirls a …
'Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.' Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behaviour have …
Indiana (1831) is an absorbing and vivid romantic novel, set partly in provincial France, partly in Paris, and partly on a tropical island. It tells the story of a beautiful and …
'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on …
