Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of shor...
Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Rave...
When a witch doctor prophesizes a plague of rabies, Marquis de Casalduero dismisses her claims - until he hears his daughter was bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. She...
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted envir...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, t...
Adaring critique of communism and how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain, Camus' essay examines the revolutions in France and Russia, and argues that since they were both guilty of producing...
One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeate...
'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.'Fifty-one years have passed since Fermina rebuffed Florentino and married Juvenal Urb...
Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. It describes his search for 'a practical religi...
Adam Smith’s landmark treatise on the free market paved the way for modern capitalism, arguing that competition is the engine of a productive society, and that self-interest will eventually c...
Influencing philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, and still strikingly modern in its psychological insights, Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death explores the concept of 'despair' as a symptom of...
Originally published anonymously, Nature was the first modern essay to recommend the appreciation of the outdoors as an all-encompassing positive force. Emerson’s writings were recognized as ...
John Ruskin overturned Victorian society's ideas about art and architecture, arguing that ancient buildings must be conserved for their deep, mystical links with the past and that creative design i...
Machiavelli is one of the most famous strategists of all time. In this collection he discusses the dangers of conspiracies, and the component parts of an army, vital for gaining and holding power i...
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue se...
John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in t...
In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yo...
Visionary English Socialist and pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris argued that all work should be a source of pride and satisfaction, and that everyone should be entitled to be...
Blending intellectual speculation with anecdote and personal reflection, the Renaissance thinker and writer Montaigne pioneered the modern essay. This selection contains his idiosyncratic and timel...