Examines King George and Queen Elizabeth's visit with Franklin D. Roosevelt in June 1939, recounting the events of the visit and analyzing the political background and the media's reaction.
From his birth in a cradle of sperm to his death on a blood-soaked pillow, Heliogabalus, Emperor from the age of fourteen, embodies the depravity and decay of Rome in the third century. Although steep
The adventures of Mowgli, the young man raised by wolves in the jungles of Central India, and his friends Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther and Kaa the python, as they face the arch villain Shere K
After her parents die of cholera in India, Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in his gloomy house in Yorkshire, where she leads a lonely and neglected life, with nothing to do apart from explo
In this poignant memoir, Naina Yeltsina, the wife of the first president of Russia, recounts the compelling story of her life, from her earliest childhood memories and the time when she met and became
The poetry of Éluard is that of the real world and its natural sensations and feelings. The main themes that stand out are love, brotherhood and kindness. His imagery is characterized by its appeal to
Der fliegende Holländer is the first of Wagner’s operas considered to be representative of his mature style. It embodies one of the major themes that recur throughout his work, that of a central chara
After the death of her father, an exiled Iranian man of letters, the bookish twenty-two-year-old Zebra finds herself alone in New York and decides to retrace the steps of her traumatic flight with her
Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day - 16th June 1904 - in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin, the a
Although ranging considerably in tone, mood and milieu, the fifteen short stories included in this collection all centre around the city of Dublin and its inhabitants at the beginning of the twentieth
Following in the footsteps of Horace’s Ars Poetica, Boileau’s Art of Poetry lays down, in four entertaining books dealing with all forms and genres of poetry, the codes and rules for good versificatio
A subtly lyrical novel, written with Peter Benson’s trademark wit and understatement, The Other Occupant explores the moving evolution of an unlikely relationship, against a beautiful countryside back
A compelling coming-of-age tale, in which Benson employs surfing as a metaphor, adding graceful comic details and a series of charming secondary characters, Riptide is an intense, even transcendent ex
'Aharon Appelfeld is fiction's foremost chronicler of the Holocaust. The stories he tells, as here in Blooms of Darkness, are small, intimate, and quietly narrated and yet are transfused into searing
A novel about a young boy whose first encounter with love both bruises and enlarges his vision of the world. Drove House has always loomed large over village life. Boarded-up for years, it is reputed
A trenchant critique of modern civilization, A Lesser Dependency movingly describes how one family’s tropical heaven became hell. In 1971 the inhabitants of Diego Garcia, a small island in the middle
Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexp
A captivating and thoroughly researched religious thriller comparable to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Written by religious scholar and unordained monk Michel Benoit.
At turns poignant and funny, Sweet Dreams, Little One - the most successful book to come out of Italy last year with over 1.2 million copies sold, and an international sensation - is the story of a se
