'No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity.' In these dialogues and essays the Stoic philosopher Seneca outlines his thoughts on how to live …
'It is singular, that my having spent a winter with one of the most dissipated women in England should have sobered my mind so completely.' Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel, Belinda, …
`Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave …
'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.' Throughout her career, Woolf invokes …
'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 …
A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakepeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the …
Hesiod, who lived in Boetia in the late eighth century BC, is one of the oldest known, and possibly the oldest of Greek poets. His Theogony contains a systematic genealogy of the …
'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 …
'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well' Julian of Norwich is one of the most celebrated figures of the English Middle Ages. She is …
'Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!' The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential …
