Classics

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...

Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. It is also a literary masterpiece: the...

Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction, and as the inventor of the modern mystery, Poe created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Attentive to the historical and...

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...

'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,...

‘Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.’Longing shimmers from these spare but...

Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly...Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen were inspired by his own life as an...

Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways,...

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound...

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...The ripples from a...

'Let us go on, then! And I will tell you the story of my sister and her daughter, from beginning to end.'Alis al—Bustani's Sa'iba (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic...

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic...

'I treat the narrative of the Lives as a kind of mirror...The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest.'In the eight lives of this collection...

"All men by nature are actuated with the desire of knowledge," declared Aristotle. The philosopher's works are foundational to the history of science, and his treatise on metaphysics, or "first philosophy," is divided into sections of previous...