With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Jonathan Swift's classic satirical narrative was first published in 1726, seven years after Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (one of its few rivals in fame and breadth of appeal).

As a parody travel-memoir it reports on extraordinary lands and societies, whose names have entered the English language: notably the minute inhabitants of Lilliput, the giants of Brobdingnag, and the Yahoos in Houyhnhnmland, where talking horses are the dominant species. It spares...
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With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.

Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.

Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely ex...
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In these sixteen tales of intellectual derring-do, Sherlock Holmes is shown at the height of his powers: he co-operates with a young Winston Churchill in the famed siege of Sydney Street; helps defeat a plan for a German invasion outlined in the Zimmerman Telegram; establishes a link between two missing lighthouse keepers and the royal treasures of King John; contends with a supernatural curse placed upon an eccentric aristocrat; and discovers a lost epic poem of Lord Byron.

Everywhere in these finely wrought tales riddles and mystery hover in the air. But they are not beyond the gras...
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Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as "flawless," Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance...
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