Please select your country preference

UK US

BLOG POSTS

Archives: Books

Mansfield Park (Collector’s Edition)

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those… Read More

Emma (Collector’s Edition)

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a ‘heroine whom no one but myself will much like’, but Emma is irresistible. ‘Handsome, clever, and rich’, Emma is also an ‘imaginist’, ‘on fire with speculation and foresight’. She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married. Her matchmaking… Read More

Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Exclusive)

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to… Read More

Down and Out in Paris and London & The Road to Wigan Pier

With an Introduction by Dr Sally Minogue and Notes by David Rampton, Department of English, University of Ottowa George Orwell is a difficult author to summarize. He was a would-be revolutionary who went to Eton, a political writer who abhorred dogma, a socialist who thrived on his image as a loner, and a member of… Read More

Nineteen Eighty-Four

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother – 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949… Read More

Descent of Man

With an Introduction by Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University. In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the mental abilities of humans, of language, of our social structures… Read More

Finnegans Wake

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Len Platt, Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London. Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family – their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well… Read More

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Tim Middleton, Head of English Studies, University of Ripon and York. ‘…man is not truly one, but truly two.’ In this powerful deconstruction of Calvinist belief and the hypocrisy at the heart of Victorian society, Stevenson creates a gothic icon in the divided self that is Dr Jekyll… Read More

Robinson Crusoe

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, opera, cartoons, and computer games. The character of… Read More