Selected Poems


W.H. Auden - 1958
    H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden.As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.

The Black Arrow


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1883
    Young Dick Shelton, caught in the midst of England's War of the Roses, finds his loyalties torn between the guardian who will ultimately betray him and the leader of a secret fellowship, The Black Arrow. As Shelton is drawn deeper into this conspiracy, he must distinguish friend from foe and confront war, shipwreck, revenge, murder, and forbidden love, as England's crown threatens to topple around him.

Human Voices


Penelope Fitzgerald - 1980
    From the Booker Prizewinning author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘The Blue Flower’; a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC – as elsewhere – some had to fail and some had to die, but where the Nine O’Clock News was always delivered, in impeccable accents, to the waiting nation.

Little Boy Lost


Marghanita Laski - 1949
    Is the child really his? And does he want him?

Ozymandias


Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1817
    The poem, Ozymandias, was composed in 1817. It is one of the most famous poems of P.B. Shelley. It was composed in competition with Shelley's friend, Horace Smith who wrote another sonnet on the same topic named Ozymandias. The theme of this sonnet is the decline of all leaders of all the empires they built. However mighty they have been in their time, history has destroyed them. Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses, a great Pharaoh king of ancient Egypt.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph


T.E. Lawrence - 1926
    It encompasses an account of the Arab Revolt against the Turks during the First World War alongside general Middle Eastern and military history, politics, adventure and drama. It is also a memoir of the soldier known as 'Lawrence of Arabia'.Lawrence is a fascinating and controversial figure and his talent as a vivid and imaginative writer shines through on every page of this, his masterpiece. Seven Pillars of Wisdom provides a unique portrait of this extraordinary man and an insight into the birth of the Arab nation.

The Complete Poems


William Blake - 1827
    His work ranges from the deceptively simple and lyrical Songs of Innocence and their counterpoint Experience - which juxtapose poems such as 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger', and 'The Blossom' and 'The Sick Rose' - to highly elaborate, apocalyptic works, such as The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Throughout his life Blake drew on a rich heritage of philosophy, religion and myth, to create a poetic worlds illuminated by his spiritual and revolutionary beliefs that have fascinated, intrigued and enchanted readers for generations.

The Balkan Trilogy


Olivia Manning - 1960
    This classic work of post-war fiction was made into a magnificent BBC television series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table


Roger Lancelyn Green - 1953
    This retelling brings to life King Arthur and the adventures of his Knights, from the quest for the Holy Grail to the final tragedy of the Last Battle.

The Complete Poems


Andrew Marvell - 1872
    The Complete Poems demonstrates his unique skill and immense diversity to the full, and includes lyrical love-poetry, religious works and biting satire. From the passionately erotic To his Coy Mistress, to the astutely political Cromwellian poems and the profoundly spiritual On a Drop of Dew, in which he considers the nature of the soul, these works are masterpieces of clarity and metaphysical imagery. Eloquent and compelling, they remain among the most vital and profound works of the era - works by a figure who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, 'speaks clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age'.

Reading in the Dark


Seamus Deane - 1996
    The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

John Keats


John Keats - 1990
    He published three volumes of poetry before his death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. This authoritative new collectioncontains the majority of Keats's non-dramatic poetry, including Endymion in its entirety, and a substantial selection of letters that provide important background material to the poet's life. Offering both prose and verse in an accessible, chronological order, this collection also includes usefulappendices on St. Agnes' Eve and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and provides a handy glossary of classical names. Keats poetry and his letters reveal a spirit of questing vitality and profound understanding. This remarkable volume attests to an astonishing maturity of power.

World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others


Candace Ward - 1997
    E. Housman, Robert Bridges, and Rudyard Kipling.Included among a wealth of memorable verses are Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "In the Pink" by Siegfried Sassoon, "In Flanders Fields" by Lieut. Col. McCrae, Robert Bridges' "To the United States of America," Thomas Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations,'" Robert Graves’s “A Dead Boche,” as well as works by Walter de la Mare, May Wedderburn Cannan, Ivor Gurney, Alice Meynell, and Edward Thomas.Moving and powerful, this carefully chosen collection offers today's readers an excellent overview of the broad range of verse produced as poets responded to the carnage on the fields of Belgium and France.

Human Traces


Sebastian Faulks - 2005
    As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men's volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas's sister Sonia. Moving and challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are.'Shocking and enlightening...touching and affecting' Daily Mail

Scoop


Evelyn Waugh - 1938
    That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner-party tip from Mrs Algernon Smith, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. One of Evelyn Waugh's most exuberant comedies, "Scoop" is a brilliantly irreverent satire of "Fleet Street" and its hectic pursuit of hot news.