In these two remarkable works, a brilliant, vain, long-suffering Frenchman describes the first twenty years of his life and their culmination in a tortured love affair with a possessive older woman. Constant attempted to conceal the fact that these two books were autobiographical. To his friends and acquaintances, however, it was clear that Adolphe was really Benjamin himself. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a champion of liberalism and the author of The History of Religion. Posterit...

Plusieurs écrivains, entraînés par l’amour de l’humanité dans de louables exagérations, n’ont envisagéla guerre que sous ses côtés funestes. Je reconnois volontiers ses avantages.Il n’est pas vrai que la guerre soit toujours un mal. À de certaines époques de l’espèce humaine, elleest dans la nature de l’homme. Elle favorise alors le développement de ses plus belles et de ses plusgrandes facultés. Elle lui ouvre un trésor de précieuses jouissances. Elle le forme ...

'One of the undisputed masterpieces of early nineteenth-century French prose fiction.'From Richard Sieburth's preface to AdolphePublished simultaneously in London and Paris in 1816, Adolphe is the story of a tragic love affair between its narrator and his lover Ellenore, two characters locked into a fatal dance of self-destruction. In what is one of the earliest examples of autofiction, from a period when all creative endeavour was ...

We are such volatile creatures that we finally feel the sentiments we feign.First published in 1816, Adolphe is the story of a young man with all the privileges and advantages of a noble birth, bt who's still haunted by the meaninglessness of life. He seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beautiful, but older and married Ellenore, a fictionalized version of Madame de Stael. The young Adolphe, inexperienced in love, falls for her unexpectedly and falters ...

Published posthumously, The Red Notebook is an account of the youth of the author of the seminal Romantic novel Adolphe, relating Constant’s eccentric and peripatetic education, his introduction to European high society and the kindling of his literary ambitions as well as his often comic and calamitous early experiences with the opposite sex and the development of his ruinous gambling habit.Part picaresque romp and part Bildungsroman, this is a spirited look at life and Romantic sensibili...

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson that was first published in 1886. It is about a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called "split personality", referred to in psychiatry as dissociative identity disorder, where within t...

On a mild winter's evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh's Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone terrace lit by gas lamps.The guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in glinting silk and satin pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats and neckties. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was at once...

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book ReviewJulian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective,...

I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I ...

At the beginning of August 1907, an early-morning train from Monte Carlo pulled into the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseilles. A trunk with a forwarding address was taken to the baggage section to await transportation. Some hours later a station employee, Louis Pons, noticed blood dripping from the trunk. The police were called and, on opening it, discovered a naked female corpse. The head and legs were missing.Thus began the investigation into a sensational case which drew the attenti...