A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the transitional stage between the realism of Joyce's Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses, and is essential to the understanding of the later work. The novels is a highly autobiographical account...

Bleak House is one of Dicken's finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and ...

Claudius the God is the second part of Robert Graves's two-part account of the life of Tiberius Claudius, 'the cripple, the stammerer, the fool of the family' who became Emperor of Rome in spite of himself in 41 A.D. With the same crystalline brilli...

Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for this greatly loved classic, possibly because of its aut...

Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose unfailing love for her father goes unreturned. 'Gir...

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers,gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, st...

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, is one of the most notorious texts in English literature. As recently as 1963 an unexpurgated edition was on the subject of a trial, yet in the 18th century John Cleland's open celebration ...

Sigmund Freud's audacious masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, has never ceased to stimulate controversy since its publication in 1900. Freud is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis, the key to unlocking the human mind, a task which h...