Contains original illustrations by the author Written for the poet John Addington Symonds\"s young daughter Janet while she was ill and confined to her bed, \"The Owl and the Pussycat\" sees the two enamoured animals sail away in a boat \\\"for a year and a day / To the land with the bong tree grows\\\", where they get married....

Contains original illustrations by the author First published in 1846 under the pseudonym \\\"Old Derry down Derry\\\", A Book of Nonsense is a collection adapted from the limericks and illustrations Edward Lear created to amuse the grandchildren of Lord Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, while he was staying with the family at Knowsley Hall....

A tongue-in-cheek manual on how servants should cope with the demands of their masters and perform their tasks in ways that will best satisfy their indolence, wastefulness and greed, Directions to Servants takes a caustic and irreverent look at master-servant relations....

In response to the dire economic conditions in eighteenth-century Ireland, A Modest Proposal ironically exhorts the poor to provide their offspring as food to the rich....

In the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire, Vivian is writing an article about the importance of lying, when he is interrupted by Cyril, who tries to tempt him away, but instead is drawn into a discussion about art, nature, literature and imagination....

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey\"s innovative, idio­syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams....

A glorious exercise in cheeky punmanship, The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders sees Jonathan Swift in fine scatological form. Flying by the seat of his pants, the great author treats us to a condensed biography of his posterior, enlivened by some inspired......

In The Death of a Civil Servant, an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The other short stories included in this......

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best....

What is the nature, essence and definition of a fart? What are the consequences and disadvantages of suppressing one? Why is farting considered to be taboo? Swift\"s The Benefit of Farting argues eloquently, in a forceful a posteriori fashion, that most of the distempers thought to affect the fairer sex are due to flatulences not adequately vented....

Inspired by Boileau\"s Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the Ancients, who argued that all essential knowledge was to be found in classical texts, and the Moderns, who claimed that contemporary......

Spurred by a lifelong fascination with the great emperor, French novelist Honore de Balzac set himself the painstaking task of collecting a selection of Napoleon\"s aphorisms from his public speeches and the gazettes of the time. Arranged into......

Never published in its author\"s lifetime and intended solely for his own children, to whom he read it every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord is an accessible and gently humorous take on the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings.Far removed from......