Classics

"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to...

A powerful depiction of a woman's fight for domestic independence and creative freedom, from the youngest of the Brontë sistersGilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell...

The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadA consummate prankster with a quick wit, Tom Sawyer...

On 15 August 778, Charlemagne’s army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant...

A heartbreaking portrayal of a woman faced by an impossible choice in the pursuit of happiness When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her...

‘Patience, Firmness, and Perseverance were my only weapons.’ Agnes Grey (1847) was Anne Bronte’s first novel and a poignant account of her own experience as a struggling governess, obliged to earn her living in one of the few ways open to an educated...

The Greek statesman Polybius (c.200–118 BC) wrote his account of the relentless growth of the Roman Empire in order to help his fellow countrymen understand how their world came to be dominated by Rome. Opening with the Punic War in 264 BC, he vividly...

Two famous, firsthand accounts of the holy war in the Middle Ages translated by Caroline SmithOriginally composed in Old French, the two chronicles brought together here offer some of the most vivid and reliable accounts of the Crusades from a Western...

Oscar Wilde was already famous as a brilliant wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. Admired by George Orwell and W. B. Yeats, the stories include poignant fairy-tales such as "The Happy Prince" and "The...

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus...

J.M. Barrie's classic tale of the "boy who would not grow up"Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie’s sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His later role as flying boy hero...

As endlessly entertaining as it is scathing in its political insight, Orwell’s classic lays bare the failures of Communism through the fable of the revolutionary animals of Manor Farm, who get rid of their obnoxious master Mr Jones in order to establish...

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly...

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler,...

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile,...

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising...

'It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . . 'Based...

Virginia Woolf's most famous novel, now in a new edition that reflects all of the author's revisions to the work.This is the definitive edition of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, complete with a cover inspired by the original...

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.In Paris, during the fall of...

“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the...