The dying Freud hustled out of Vienna into exileA Broadway musical on the subject of Trotsky in New YorkThe last throes of the planet Earth in AD 2000These are all items onThe End of the World NewsPsychoanalysis, international socialism and The End - three themes, three stories - outrageously counterpointed into trinity, in a novel stuffed with verbal pyrotechnics, amazing sleights of fantasy, and tantalizing jokes, and which is crowned by a brilliant, unexpected, out-of-this-world finale - all written by one novelist at the height of his powers.

    A self-appointed revolutionary hero, Howard always comes out on top. And Malcolm Bradbury dissects him in this savagely funny novel that has been universally acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of the decade.

    Joining Master Will in Brahms and Simon's comic mayhem are all the usual Elizabethan suspects, though we see them in a most unusual, and hilarious, light: Francis Bacon, for example, scheming for possession of one of the beds in which the Queen has slept; and Walter Raleigh, staging an elaborate feast at which England's great will have their first taste of the mysterious Potato. And then there's Viola Compton, stage-struck Maid of Honour, who disguises herself as a boy-player and catches the eye of the playwright himself. Has Will found the muse he needs? Is Shakespeare in love?With an Introduction by Ned Sherrin.

    Soon enough, the men are variously tormented — defrauded or stolen from; blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid séances — and then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors — from the rising price of frozen peas ("Your hand's never out of your pocket") to epileptic fits, forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder. And every horror delights: each is lit up by Spark's uncanny wit — at once malicious, funny, and deadly serious.

    Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really start to begin.Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.

    Four decades later, it is clear that he also fashioned the most enduring fiction ever about aerial warfare.Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill--sometimes under dubious circumstances--Cleve's luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, The Hunters is a landmark in the literature of war.

    From the author of "Witchcraft" and "Buttons in the Marsh" comes this black comedy about an unsuccessful solicitor who decides to murder his wife, with devastating results.

    Nancy Mitford's most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love satirizes British aristocracy in the twenties and thirties through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modelled on Mitford's own.The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

    Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best.

    The Virgin in the Garden is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.

    But it is hilarious. Mr. Blandings, a successful New York advertising executive, and his wife want to escape the confines of their tiny midtown apartment. They design the perfect home in the idyllic country, but soon they are beset by construction troubles, temperamental workmen, skyrocketing bills, threatening lawyers, and difficult neighbors. Mr. Blandings' dream house soon threatens to be the nightmare that undoes him. This internationally bestselling book by Eric Hodgins is illustrated by William Steig and was made into a film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy -- and a later film starring Tom Hanks called The Money Pit.

    As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing creates in The Good Terrorist a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion.

    When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Little does Henrietta know what fascinations the Fisher house itself contains–along with secrets that have the potential to topple a marriage and redeem the life of a peculiar young boy. By the time Henrietta leaves the house that evening, she is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge that is usually reserved only for adults.

    But when she falls in love with Bosinney, a penniless architect who utterly rejects the Forsyte values, their affair touches off a series of events which can only end in disgrace and disaster.John Galsworthy tackles his theme of the demise of the upper-middle classes with irony and compassion.

    This charming, delightful and extremely funny book about daily life in a frugal English household was named by booksellers as the out-of-print novel most deserving of republication.This is a gently self-effacing, dry-witted tale of a long-suffering and disaster-prone Devon lady of the 1930s. A story of provincial social pretensions and the daily inanities of domestic life to rival George Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody.