He was a gossip columnist’s dream. Piccadilly Jim’s life was a collage of broken promises and drunken brawls.And Jim’s straight-laced Victorian aunt was not amused. So, she decided to reform him. Unfortunately, her reform project started at a time when Jim had fallen in love and had already decided to reform himself. Thus, life became complicated.Jim pretends to be himself—a beautiful display of Wodehousean logic; hilarious indeed!

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once a historical war epic, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.Noted for its mastery of realistic detail and psychological analysis, War and Peace follows the metamorphosis of five aristocratic families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Individual stories interweave as each of Tolstoy’s memorable characters seek fulfillment, fall in love, make ...

The history of China is as rich and strange as that of any country on earth. Yet for many, China’s history remains unknown, or known only through the stylized images that generations in the West have cherished or reviled as truth.With his command of character and event––the product of thirty years of research and reflection in the field––Spence dispels those myths in a powerful narrative. Over four centuries of Chinese history, from the waning days of the once-glorious Ming Dynasty...

Set in the Parisian underworld of the early nineteenth century, Les Misérables follows the adventures of Jean Valjean, once an honest peasant, who spent nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family.A hardened and bitter criminal upon his release, Valjean is transformed when an act of compassion by a priest, whom he robbed, saves him from returning to prison. Changing his identity and his ways, Valjean becomes a...

This passionate novel of ethics and morality, religion and philosophy was Dostoevsky’s final and best work.After spending four years in a Siberian penal settlement, during which time he underwent a religious conversion, Dostoevsky developed a keen ability for deep character analysis. In The Brothers Karamazov, he explores human nature at its most loathsome and cruel but never flinches at what he finds.The Brothers Karamazov tells the stirr...

Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the twentieth century.His great oratory and leadership during the Second World War were only part of his huge breadth of experience and achievement. Studying his life is a fascinating way to imbibe the history of his era and gain insight into key events that have shaped our time.In political office at the end of WWI, he foresaw the folly of Versailles and feared what a crippled Germany woul...

This brilliant satirical novel traces the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex, a young man who survives the baleful influence of a hateful, hypocritical father, a doting mother, and a debauched wife to emerge as a decent, happy human being. A fascinating character study, it is also a stinging satire of the Victorian gentry's pomposity, sentimentality, pseudo-respectability, and refined cruelty—one still capable of delivering deathblows to the same traits in our present world. Since its origi...

This monumental work made the Arthurian cycle available for the first time in English. Malory took a body of legends from Celtic folklore that had been adapted into French literature, gave them an English perspective, and produced a work which ever since has had tremendous influence upon literature.The story begins with King Uther Pendragon’s use of enchantment to lay with Igraine, Duchess of Cornwall. Arthur is conceived and taken away in secret, returning as a young man to claim ...

Archibald Gracie was probably among the last to leave the sinking Titanic on that cold April night in 1912, one of the most traumatic events in maritime history. In this unique account, he describes his personal experiences and remarkable escape from death in the icy waters of the Atlantic, painting a vivid picture of what it was like on board the Titanic in its final hours.Tracking down other survivors for their stories and attending court hearings to obtain the ...

When noted English writer W. Somerset Maugham set off for the South Seas to regain his health, his experiences would become the bedrock for the stories represented here. These are among Maugham’s best work, as well as some of the best stories ever written about the exotic South Seas.“Mackintosh” is a taut psychological study of two officials on a remote tropic island. “The Fall of Edward Barnard” is a story about what is important in life, a precursor to Maugham’s well-known novel,...

In 1904, Great Britain was at the height of its prosperity; but G. K. Chesterton saw the drudgery of capitalism and bureaucracy eating away at the eccentricity and spontaneity of the human spirit. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, Chesterton creates a witty satire of staid government, set in a London of the future.Auberon Quin, a common clerk who looks like a cross between a baby and an owl and is often seen standing on his head, is one day told that he has...

In 1963 Norman F. Cantor published his breakthrough narrative history of the Middle Ages. Here is a significant revision, update, and expansion of that work.The Civilization of the Middle Ages incorporates newer research and novel perspectives, especially on the foundations of the Middle Ages and the late Middle Ages of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A sharper focus on social history, Jewish history, women’s roles in society, and popular religion and heresy distin...