Classics

Plutarch’s vivid and engaging portraits of the Spartans and their customs are a major source of our knowledge about the rise and fall of their remarkable Greek city-state between the sixth and third centuries BC. Through his Lives of Sparta’s leaders and...

Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is one of the most important philosophical works of the nineteenth century, the basic statement of one important stream of post-Kantian thought. It is without question Schopenhauer's greatest...

Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years.Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesarea in Palestine, broke new ground in writing the History and provided a...

The first book by the author of the classic philosophical text Beyond Good and Evil. The youthful faults of this work were exposed by the author himself in the brilliant Attempt at a Self-Criticism, which he added to the new edition of 1886. But the...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written...

Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write. A modern reworking of the Faust...

Joris-Karl Huysmans' shocking novel of an innocent's descent into a world of depraved, blasphemous rituals.Durtal, a shy, censorious man, is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous fifteenth-century child-murderer thought to be the original...

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his...

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters...

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror.A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once...

Most people are familiar, at least by repute, with Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but few are aware that other poems survive that were attributed to Homer in ancient times. The Homeric Hymns are now known to be the work of various...

Crossley-Holland—the widely acclaimed translator of Old English texts—introduces the Anglo-Saxons through their chronicles, laws, letters, charters, and poetry, with many of the greatest surviving poems printed in their entirety.About the...

Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism is arguably the greatest of all literary dystopias, contriving to look back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst simultaneously predicting with uncanny accuracy the worst excesses...

In the present state of society, it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions,...

Xenophon was acknowledged in Antiquity as a philosopher, a historian (third in the triad of great Classical historians, alongside Herodotus and Thucydides), and a literary artist. His narrative was appreciated for its literary qualities including its...

"...the more honourable animals have been allotted a more honourable soul..."What is the nature of the soul? It is this question that Aristotle sought to answer in De Anima(On the Soul). In doing so he offers a psychological theory that encompasses not...

This is a new verse translation of Lucretius's only known work, a didactic poem written in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor is especially helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or...

'That was how things stood in the city at the time. With no one in charge, murders were taking place almost every day and the elections could not be held.'Books 36-40 of the Roman History by Cassius Dio (born ca. 163 CE), covers 69-50 BCE, the last...

I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother...

Joseph - a 22-year-old self-styled nihilist in search of meaning, found releasing a badger from a zoo, seducing his best friend's mother, dancing at a Dionysic revel and spending his days in a mortuary - is the anti-hero at the heart of this novel.