This anthology spans 150 years of modern Irish culture, from the dawning of a powerful nationalist consciousness inspired by Wolfe Tone and Daniel O'C ...

The real-life Jonathan Wild, gangland godfather and self-styled 'Thieftaker General', controlled much of the London underworld until he was executed f ...

Both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741) were prompted by the success of Richardson's Pamela (1740), of which Shamela is a splendidly bawdy parod ...

How did the camel get his hump? Why won't cats do as they are told"? Who invented reading and writing? How did an inquisitive little elephant change t ...

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as Fanny Hill), the most famous erotic novel in English, was denounced by its author as 'a Book I disda ...

Collins's ability to construct a gripping situation and to create an atmosphere of mystery and menace is fully evident in the three novellas reprinted ...

Magdalen Vanstone and her sister Norah learn the true meaning of social stigma in Victorian England only after the traumatic discovery that their dear ...

This selection offers a cross-section from the 6,000 surviving sheets that constitute Leonardo's notebooks, including his thoughts on landscape, optic ...

The new Oxford World's Classics edition of Oliver Twist is based on the authoritative Clarendon edition, which uses Dickens's revised text of 1846. It ...

The romance between Captain Wentworth and Anne, the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, seems doomed because of the young man's family connections and lack ...

The Phaedo is acknowledged to be one of Plato's masterpieces, showing him both as a philosopher and as a dramatist at the height of his powers. For it ...