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 the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices. Includes these novels: At Lady Molly'sCasanova's Chinese RestaurantThe Kindly Ones

    A pleasant romantic tale set in the Victorian era, Under the Greenwood Tree is one of Thomas Hardy's most gentle and pastoral novels.

    With subtle twists and turns in a fascinating portrait of society, Maurice Baring conveys the moral that love is too strong to be overcome by mere mortals.

    Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."

    The sort of atmosphere where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle it is the end of the line anyway and time for him to retire with his African wife, Sarah.The Human Factor is Greene’s most extensive attempt to incorporate into fiction what he had learned of espionage when recruited by MI6 during World War II . . . What it offers is a veteran excursion into Greene’s imaginative world . . . Sometimes seen as a brooding prober into the dark recesses of the soul where sins and scruples alike fester, he is equally at home in sending a narrative careering along at break-neck pace . . . Raising the demarcation line between ‘serious’ fiction and fast-plotted entertainment, Greene ensures that components of both jostle energizingly together in his pages.” –from the Introduction by Peter Kemp --

    After plans to elope with her lover to Australia and train as a nurse in London lead to nothing, she joins a traveling theater group and succumbs to the charms of the dark, passionate Italian Ciccio.This edition also contains pictures, personal notes, and other critical primary source material.

    But at the same time he was too organically a radical ever to be confused with a conservative. Result: Agent of Chaos! Boris Johnson thinks he wants democracy. But in the course of his adventures he discovers that democracy to him means freedom. It's a banned concept from the Millennium of Religion. Like God. He finds himself dealing with a byzantine political situation worthy of anything from the banned past. The dictatorship is the Hegemony. Opposition is provided by the aptly named agents of C.H.A.O.S. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Assassins plays a game that no one can fathom. Whose side are they on? Whose fool are you? Spinrad explores his philosophical theme in a manner all too rare in contemporary science fiction. The problem is that Order will always try to eliminate any random factors. By its very nature, it encourages opposition and that feeds the forces of chaos. But chaos has built in problems as well. Its victories cannot help but feed the forces of reaction, of order. The heroes in this novel ultimately opt for personal freedom. The villains try to establish a dictatorship over the very nature of reality itself. And then Spinrad throws in the discovery of aliens. A starship sets forth to meet them, the Prometheus. The Hegemony doesn't like that.

    Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult.

    They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

    Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, claimed to have been born in St David's, Pembrokeshire, Wales; after his death he was discovered to have been born of Welsh parents in Hendon, Middlesex. His famous first novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) was begun in St David's from a draft he had written in India, and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director John Ford. None But the Lonely Heart, his second novel, was published in 1943, and subsequently made into a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. As well as novels including Green, Green My Valley Now (1975) and I Stand on a Quiet Shore (1982), Llewellyn wrote two highly successful plays, Poison Pen and NooseIf you enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, you might like Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Vivid, eloquent, poetical, glowing with an inner flame of emotion'The Times Literary Supplement

    The gruff and hearty crew teach the young man to be worth his salt as they fish the waters off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Brimming with adventure and humor.

    One such couple are Guy and Harriet Pringle, who have escaped the war in Europe only to find the conflict once more on their doorstep, providing a volatile backdrop to their own personal battles. The civilian world meets the military through the figure of Simon Boulderstone, a young army officer who will witness the tragedy and tension of war on the frontier at first hand. An outstanding author of wartime fiction, Olivia Manning brilliantly evokes here the world of the Levant - Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria - with perception and subtlety, humour and humanity.

    Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1903. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II. THE ARKEST. "Good gracious M. Rodolph," exclaimed Rigolette, running in, pale and trembling, " a commissary of police and the guard have come here." "Divine justice watches over me," said M. Pipelet, in a transport of pious gratitude. "They have come to arrest Cabrion; unfortunately it is too late." A commissary of police, wearing his tricoloured scarf around his waist underneath his black coat, entered the lodge. His countenance was impressive, magisterial, and serious. "M. le Commissaire is too late; the malefactor has escaped," said M. Pipelet, in a sorrowful voice; "but I will give you his description, --villainous smile, impudent look, insulting --" "Of whom do you speak?" inquired the magistrate. "Of Cabrion, M. le Commissaire; but, perhaps, if you make all haste, it is not yet too late to catch him," added M. Pipelet. "I know nothing about any Cabrion," said the magistrate, impatiently. "Does one Jerome Morel, a working lapidary, live in this house?" "Yes, mon commissaire," said Madame Pipelet, putting herself into a military attitude. "Conduct me to his apartment." "Morel, the lapidary " said the porteress, excessively surprised;" why, he is the mildest lambkin in the world. He is incapable of --" "Does Jerome Morel live here or not?" "He lives here, sir, with his family, in one of the attics." "Lead me to his attic." Then, addressing himself to a man who accompanied him, the magistrate said: "Let two of the municipal guard wait below, and not leave the entrance. Send Justing for a hackney-coach." The man left the lodge to put these orders in execution. "Now," continued the magistrate, addressing himself to M. Pipelet, " lead me to Morel." "If it is all the same to you, mon commissaire, I will do that for Alfred; he is indisposed from Cabrion...

    Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and "rather moth-eaten already," a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen "flatter than any pancake," Gordon has given up a "good" job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), "If you have no money ... women won't love you." On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra--a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of "mingy, lower-middle-class decency" he is fleeing in his downward flight.In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell has created a darkly compassionate satire to which anyone who has ever been oppressed by the lack of brass, or by the need to make it, will all too easily relate. He etches the ugly insanity of what Gordon calls "the money-world" in unflinching detail, but the satire has a second edge, too, and Gordon himself is scarcely heroic. In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all--that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself. Orwell keeps both of his edges sharp to the very end--a "happy" ending that poses tough questions about just how happy it really is. That the book itself is not sour, but constantly fresh and frequently funny, is the result of Orwell's steady, unsentimental attention to the telling detail; his dry, quiet humor; his fascination with both the follies and the excellences of his characters; and his courageous refusal to embrace the comforts of any easy answer.

    the plot skips around like gunfire on the ricochet." - LOS ANGELES TIMES "Superior stuff - taut, well observed, original and civilized." - THE TIMES "The women are not mere decoration; they are at the heart of the action." - THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR "Suspense builds from start to finish... the author will rank alongside le Carre, Deighton, and Follett." - WEST COAST REVIEW OF BOOKS VIENNA late 1980s - violence is breaking out in strife-torn Poland. A spark that could set the Soviet prison of Eastern Europe ablaze. There are dangerous Western plans to ensure that the inevitable rising will not be a repeat of Hungary in 1956. In Moscow, faceless men and women know that Bill Cable, after years banished to diplomatic backwaters, is into something big - so big they will destroy him to get it. If they fail, this could mean the end for the Soviet Union. They've had a stranglehold on Cable ever since the tragedy, deep in the past, that led to him being kicked out of the Intelligence Service. Now he is back, as British Ambassador in Vienna. Still compromised but, just to make sure, they kidnap his daughter, Sarah, and threaten her life. Will he betray her - or his country and the freedom of millions?