No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau. His central preoccupations - the illusory nature of much of what we call progress, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the......

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) began his diary on 1 Jan 1660, immediately prior to the Restoration of Charles II to the throne and the subsequent loosening of the rigid and social code enforced during the Puritan Commonwealth. As variously, Clerk to the......

Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing......

When people use the adjective \'Kafkaesque\', it is The Trial they have in mind - the nightmarish world of Joseph K., where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and any help there may be comes from unexpected sources. K....

\"War and Peace\" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon\'s war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy\'s view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred......

The Prophet represents the acme of Kahlil Gibran\'s achievement. Writing in English, Gibran adopted the tone and cadence of King James I\'s Bible, fusing his personalised Christian philosophy with a spirit and oriental wisdom that derives from......

Ovid\'s Metamorphoses, completed around AD8, shows the presence and prevalence of change in the world. Beginning with chaos and creation, Ovid embraces a vast array of mythological tales within his theme of transformation. Phaeton, Narcissus,......

According to Mohammed, the one true religion was revealed to five great prophets before him - Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. But each time their message was ignored and people chose to worship false gods instead. As the last and greatest......

The Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD) gives an ironic and parodic twist to love poetry in his highly original and entertaining explorations of sexual desire and its consequences. In his Amores (Loves, or Love Affairs) he partly celebrates, partly......

Modern views of Columbus are overshadowed by guilt about past conquests. Credit for discovering the New World, we are told, belongs to its original inhabitants rather than any European, and Columbus gave those inhabitants nothing apart from death,......

In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastophe as the subject and......

A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx\"s prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not......

Dating from around 300BC, Tao Te Ching is the first great classic of the Chinese school of philosophy called Taoism. Within its pages is summed up a complete view of the cosmos and how human beings should respond to it. A profound mystical insight......

In Symposium, a group of Anthenian aristocrats attend a party held by Agathon to celebrate his victory in the drama festival of the Dionysia. They talk about love until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in, and decides to talk about Socrates instead.......

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