Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.Includes these novels: Books Do Furnish a Room Temporary Kings Hearing Secret Harmonies

    Here are three of his finest works, presented in their entirety. Tess of the Durbervilles tells the tragic tale of a poor young girl's coming of age and her traumatic relationships with two men: the wealthy and cold Alec D'Urberville and the beautiful, but unforgiving Angel Clare. Michael Henchard, the title character of The Mayor of Casterbridge, reaches the pinnacles of power-only to lose everything through folly and bad luck. Set in Hardy's beloved Wessex, and always attentive to the struggles of everyday life in the farming community, Far From the Madding Crowd centers on Bathsheba Everdene and the men who love her.

    "On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet," commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, her Selected Poems (New Directions, 1964). The Selected won her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie in 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smith’s first published collection (London, 1937) was A Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, "images of joy and terror." A Newsweek reviewer wrote, "Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong."

    Tolstoyan in scope and  Proustian in detail  but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence from Britain. In The Towers of Silence, Barbie Batchelor, a British missionary and schoolteacher, befriends a British family and witnesses the trial of Hari Kumar, an Indian man accused of assaulting his beloved Daphne Manners, while observing the dangerously cruel Captain Ronald Merrick, Hari’s nemesis. In A Division of the Spoils, the chaos of the departure of the British and the fervor of Partition wreaks havoc upon the twilight of the Raj — and the end of a era. On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author’s capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose. The other two novels in the Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the Scorpion, are also available from Everyman’s Library. With a new introduction by Hilary Spurling (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. Hisadmirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

    It tells the tale of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, a senior sales executive at Sunshine Desserts, who behaves more and more strangely, until eventually he leaves all his clothes on a beach, goes off to lead a new life.

    Compiled and written by 'New Musical Express' editors Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, with over 200 illustrations, a complete diary, selected quotes and all possible recording details.

    Alive with feeling and intelligence, endearing characters and feminist insights, this is one of the very best by an immensely gifted author.

    Each has its own concern: the first with theoretical understanding, and with human conduct in general; the second with an ideal mode of human relationship which the author has called civil association; and the third with that ambiguous, historic association commonly called a modern European state. Running through the work is Professor Oakshott's belief in philosophical reflection as an adventure: the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms what he already understands, and where the understanding is sought is a disclosure of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed and nota substitute for it. Its most appropriate expression is an essay, which, he writes, does not dissemble the conditionality of the conclusions it throws up and although it may enlighten it does not instruct.

    Not a usual marker, but a feather, a tip feather from a peacock's train, lucently blue and green ...

    A novel from the author of PARSON'S DAUGHTER, HAROLD, DINNER OF HERBS, GOODBYE HAMILTON, BLACK VELVET GOWN, INVISIBLE CORD, WHIP, MOTH, CULTURED HANDMAIDEN, HAMILTON and BILL BAILEY.

    This reprint (with updated 'Suggestions for Further Reading') of the Houghton Mifflin edition makes David Bevington's classic anthology of medieval drama available again at an affordable price.

    He was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. At age 21 he went to London as a solicitor's clerk. He won a literary competition in Tit Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full time. From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship and writing much serious criticism, and also theatre journalism, one of his special interests. In 1902 Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries, appeared. In 1908 The Old Wives' Tale was published, and was an immediate success throughout the English-speaking world. His most famous works are the Clayhanger (1910) trilogy and The Old Wives' Tale. These books draw on his experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. Among his other books are: The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907), Hilda Lessways (1911), The Author's Craft (1914), The Lion's Share (1916), and The Roll-Call (1919).

    Its aim is not merely to relate literary facts, but by a close critical examination of the novels, to find in them a significant structure of ideas and values which related to the Brontës' ambiguous situation within the class system of their society. Its intention is to forge close relations between the novels, nineteenth-century ideology, and historical forces, in order to illuminate the novels themselves in a radically new perspective. When originally published in 1975 (second edition in 1988), it was the first full-length Marxist study of the Brontës and is now reissued to celebrate 30 years since its first publication. It includes a new Introduction by Terry Eagleton that reflects the changes that have happened in Marxist literary criticism since 1988, and situates this reissue in current debates.

    During a sudden snowstorm, Janet ventures out onto a forbidden hill to rescue a lost sheep only to wind up needing help herself.

    Virginia Woolf was born and lived much of her life in the city, using it as the backdrop for many of her works. She was a fervent walker and her keen eye keeps pace as she strides across the city that she loved above all others. "The London Scene" begins in the docks of the east and flows against the Thames tide westwards, following the commercial pulse of the city from the disembarkment of goods at Tilbury to the crowds of shoppers on Oxford Street, before winding on majestically to the grand buildings of the City and Westminster. Virginia Woolf pauses to admire the splendour of St. Paul's and the austerity of Westminster Abbey. She visits the spartan houses of literary men, and concludes her walk with a wry look at the House of Commons. With specially commissioned illustrations by Suzanne Barton.

    When the man whom he has harmed and betrayed reappears as head of his department, Hilary hopes for forgiveness, even for redemption and a new life, but finds himself haunted by a ghostly repetition.

    

    A squat nose stubbed like a plasticine afterthought on her face, a chin too long, and eyes straining to meet each other form a sad picture that dooms Amy to a life of solitude and lovelessness. Now in her fifties, Amy lives alone with her crippled brother, both prisoners of the hopes and aspirations of their youth. Then Amy makes a final bid for happiness, a last ditch attempt to meet someone who might love her. Suddenly her life takes on dizzying new dimensions as she explores untrodden paths of sexual awareness in an all-or-nothing gamble for dangerous and delicious success.