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The three novels which make up The Forsyte Saga chronicle the ebbing social power of the commerical upper-middle class Forsyte family between 1886 and 1920. This, the only critical edition of Galsworthy's popular masterpiece, contains detailed notes which are vital to the saga, explaining particularly the contemporary artistic and literary allusions, and slang of the time.

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, is involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory which goes disastrously wrong. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.

This new edition of one of Shakespeare's greatest history plays offers a freshly considered text fully alert to its intense theatrical aspects. A helpful Introduction discusses the play's structure, language, and performance history, and the notes provide an illuminating commentary on details of the text.

The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. In her introduction to this edition Kate Flint illuminates Lawrence's aims and achievements against the background of the burgeoning century.

The poems have been rendered into vigorous contemporary English. A selection of Michelangelo's letters, many of them to important contemporaries such as Vasari and Duke Cosimo, is accompanied by the `Life' of the great artist written by his pupil Ascanio Condivi.

The modern, unacademic idiom of A.D. Melville's translation opens the way to a fresh understanding of Ovid's unique and elusive vision of reality.

Frederick Ahl's new translation captures the excitement, poetic energy, and intellectual force of Virgil's epic poem in a way that has never been done before. Echoing the Virgilian hexameter the verse stays almost line for line with the original in a thrillingly accurate and engaging style.

Thomas Hardy is among the best loved of the great English poets. The new selection of his work made by Samuel Hynes represents all of Hardy's verse collections and gives generous samples from his finest.

Ace literary detective John Sutherland and Austen buff Deirdre Le Faye challenge the reader to discover just how well you really know your favourite author. Starting with easy, factual questions the quiz progresses to find out how much you know by deduction and hypothesis- what really motivates the characters, and what is going on underneath the surface? Hugely entertaining as well as full of fascinating insights, So You Think You Know Jane Austen?guarantees you will know her much better after reading it. The answers are at the back!

Grace Abounding is a classic of spiritual autobiography, here set alongside four other contemporary autobiographies to provide a greater historical context.Contains: Grace Abounding by John Bunyan; A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr John Bunyan; Confessions by Richard Norwood; A Short History of the Life of John Crook; The Lost Sheep Found by Lawrence Clarkson; The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont

Virginia Woolf's humorous biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel is charming yet also radical. A work of sensuous imagination, it opens up a range of questions about class, society, and cultural attitudes which are woven throughout the whole of Woolf's writing.

Based on Hawthorne's own experience of a Utopian socialist community outside Boston, The Blithedale Romance tells of the attempts of a like-minded group to begin reforming a dissipated America. However, rather than dropping bad habits and changing the world, Coverdale the prurient bachelor, Hollingsworth the furious philanthropist, Zenobia the voluptuous feminist, and Priscilla the vulnerable seamstress soon find themselves pursuing egotistical paths whichmust lead ultimately to tragedy. Evoking a bright rural idyll which fails to survive the ravages of lust and power, Hawthorne cynically undermines the fatuities of nineteenth-century American idealism.

Frederick Douglass's Narrative recounts his life as a slave in Maryland and escape to freedom in 1838. An important slave autobiography, it is significant both for what it tells us about slave life and about its author. It is here reprinted with contexualizing source material and other writings by Douglass, as well as an introduction discussing its literary and historical significance.

Hester (1883) is about the difficulty of understanding human nature, and a compulsive story of financial and sexual risk-taking that mounts towards a searing climax. It tells of the ageing but powerful Catherine Vernon, and her conflict with the young and determined Hester, whose growing attachment to Edward, Catherine's favourite, spells disaster for all concerned.

This representative selection includes five tales of very different kinds written in the 1850s and the longer Cousin Phillis. Immensely readable and sophisticated works of art, they show Gaskell's mastery of the genre, in an edition that celebrates her achievements in shorter fiction and the context in which they first appeared.

Edward FitzGerald's version of the Rubaiyat of the medieval Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam contains some of the most frequently quoted - and beautiful - lines in English poetry. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition does justice to the scope and complexity of FitzGerald's lyrical meditation on 'human death and fate'.

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This newly translated selection of 36 of the best decadent tales from the French fin-de-siecle brings together some the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. Hilarious and horrifying, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales cast a cold eye on the modern world. Superbly translated and introduced by Stephen Romer.

In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. A captivating blend of fact and fantasy, Mandeville's Book is newly translated in an edition that brings us closer to Mandeville's worldview.

Arrian's account of Alexander's life and campaigns, published as the Anabasis and its companion piece the Indica, is our prime source for the history of Alexander, told with great narrative skill. This edition features a new translation of both texts, introduction, notes, guide to military systems and terminology, maps and a full index.

In Books 6 to 10 of his monumental history of Rome, Livy deals with the period in which Rome recovered from its Gallic disaster to impose mastery over almost the entire Italian peninsula in a series of ever greater wars. Vivid portrayals of personalities, politics, warfare, and religion bring 4th-century Italy vividly alive in this new translation.

A new prose translation of Ovid's poetical calendar of the Roman year, with its various observances and festivals, recording a wealth of detail on rites and customs recorded day by day. A lively introduction explains the background to the poem, and the edition includes notes, a glossary, and an index of names.

Lily Dale falls passionately in love with the urbane Adolphus Crosbie and is devastated when he abandons her for another. She has another suitor, devoted to her since childhood: can she find happiness in Johnny's courtship? This is a new edition of one of Trollope's most successful Barsetshire novels.