Charles Duff’s 1928 study of state sanctioned-killing, botched executions and the relative merits and demerits of decapitation. ‘A Handbook on Hanging’ is an anti-capital punishment polemic in the honourably ironic tradition of Jonathan Swift and Stephen Leacock. Duff updated his ‘Handbook’ in 1938, 1948 and in 1961, but this version is the original 1928 edition. Charles Duff (Enniskillen, N.I., 1894-1966) a talented linguist and travel writer, served in the Briti...

A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas bring together Virginia Woolf's most sustained meditations on women, literature, education, and power. The first essay, poised between fiction, lecture, and critical argument, invents a supple, ironic narrative voice to expose the material conditions behind literary production. The second, more polemical and documentary in method, links patriarchy, professional exclusion, nationalism, and war. Together they stand at the center of modernist feminist pro...

This edition includes the following editor's introduction: G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writerFirst published in 1915, “All Things Considered” collects more than thirty essays that English author G. K. Chesterton wrote as columns for the London Daily News in the years before World War I.The contents of “All Things Considered” are quintessential Chesterton, covering subjects from poetry to patriotism, anonymity to impartiality, from dem...

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure...

When honest young Caleb Williams comes to work as a secretary for Squire Falkland, he soon begins to suspect that his new master is hiding a terrible secret. But as he digs deeper into Falkland's past and finally unearths the guilty truth, the results of his curiosity prove calamitous when - even though Caleb has loyally sworn never to disclose what he has discovered - the Squire enacts a cruel revenge. A tale of gripping suspense and psychological power, William Godwin's novel creates a s...

This vintage book comprises 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'; an autobiographical account of Thomas De Quincey's opium addiction and the effect that it had on his life. This text was the first major book that De Quincey published, and one that made him famous in a very short period of time. De Quincey's Confessions assumed an authoritative influence on the public, as well as scientific opinion of opium for several generations. It went through almost innumerable editions and revision...

The Times has the most famous letters page of any newspaper. This delightful selection of over 300 items of correspondence over the last century shows precisely why.As a forum for debate, playground for opinion-formers, advertising space for decision-makers and noticeboard for eccentrics, nothing rivals it for entertainment value. By turns well-informed, well-intentioned, curious, quirky and bizarre, since 1914 it has taken the temperature of the British way of life and provided a ...

A fascinating look—first published in 1894—at two philanthropists known as the "Prisoner's Friends" and the early history of prison reform.Prisons in England were once dark, inhumane places lacking any regulations. The facilities were poorly managed and unsanitary, and prisoners were treated like animals. One man and one woman, the "Prisoner's Friends," sought to change that.Through Prison Bars is an in-depth account of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry...

'It is a salutary thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of 'grandmotherly' legislation...'Contemporary readers of a progressive bent may like to think it elementary that certain inhumane practices in which Britons indulged pre-1800 came to be abolished. But as...