The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own dest...

Possibly the most colourful figure in the history of Western music, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was certainly the most eloquent. His autobiography is among the greatest ever written....

On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the cellars of the Chateau d\"If, an impregnable sea fortress in which he is imprisoned indefinitely....

Benjamin Franklin’s account of his rise from poverty and obscurity to affluence and fame is a self-portrait of a quintessential American which has charmed every generation of readers since it first appeared in 1791....

This volume of John Muir\"s selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness....

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America\"s post-war generation....

Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in 1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17 of them in China. He isone of the few early adventurers whose name nearly everyone knows. His book was one of the best-loved works of the Middle Ages, and has remained popular ever since....

Primo Levi\"s account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. If This is a Man describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. The Truce covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame....

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic....

A burlesque epic in the tradition of The good soldier Schweik, Catch-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America\"s involvement in Korea. The \"catch\" is that soldiers have to claim to be mad in order to get out of fighting - but being capable of making such a claim automatically proves them sane....

The spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period and the crowning achievement of that caustic, brilliantly learned age was Voltaire’s Candide, published in 1759, at the height of its author’s enormous European fame....

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony....

Tacitus was the greatest historian of the Roman empire. Born in about AD 55, he served as administrator and leading senator. This career gave him an intimate view of the empire at its highest levels, experience brought to bear on his writing. His major works are the Annals and the Histories, both of which have come down to us incomplete....

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides....

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself....