The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject …
As the the bicentennary of the French Revolution draws near, Dickens' historical novel serves as a timely reminder of nineteenth-century reactions to that great upheaval. Set …
'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life...I likewise taught him to say Master' Robinson Crusoe's seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when …
'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 …
'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 …
In 1773, James Boswell made a long-planned journey across the Scottish Highlands with his English friend Samuel Johnson; the two spent more than a hundred days together. Their tour …
'Thus she was decapitated, and this was the end to which she was brought by her unbridled lusts.' For over two centuries after Boccaccio's groundbreaking Decameron, the Italian …
'he looked up wistfully in my face, and gravely asked - "Mamma, why are you so wicked?"' The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert …
Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-2. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract …
Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by …
