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  Christmas Tree A (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
  I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men-and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more."

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  Arch Rascal An - From their pens...

  Knut Hamsun

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  Knud Pedersen was born in Lom in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway on the 4th of August, 1859 in what was then the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway.  He was the fourth son of seven children born to poor parents who, when he was three, were invited to an uncle’s farm to work his land. 
  When he was nine he moved away from his family to help another uncle who ran a post office.  Whilst with him he was beaten and starved which manifested in a series of chronic nervous difficulties.  The treatment endured for six years until he managed to escape back to Lom. 
  For some time he now took any job that was available to him, including store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, elementary-school teacher and ropemaker's apprentice.  At about the same time, with the wealth of these gained experiences, he began to explore his literary talents. 
  In 1877 he published his first book ‘The Enigmatic Man: A Love Story from Northern Norway’, others soon followed but real success only came in 1890 with ‘Hunger’, an influential work for later novelists with its internal monologue and bizarre logic.  His work is often associated with Pantheism; where nature and mankind are unified in a strong and often mystical bond.   
  His work was so influential that in 1920 he was awarded the Novel Prize for Literature. 
  Shortly after this point his works became fewer and his interests darker.  During World War II he became a fervent admirer of the Nazi’s, even meeting Hitler, even though German armies had overrun Norway.  With the war’s end he was detained on charges of treason.  His old age was apparently the primary reason given for Hamsun receiving only a fine.  Other reasons also sought to excuse his abhorrent behaviour but it was clear that whilst he was loved for his literature he was detested for his politics and morals. 
  His literary canon includes more than 20 novels, a poetry collection, short stories, plays, a travelogue, other works of non-fiction and essays. 
  Knut Hamsun died on the 19th February 1952 in Grimstad. He was 92.

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  Of Human Bondage - The Classic Tale

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  The Narrow Corner is a novel by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, published by William Heinemann in 1932. A quote from Meditations, iii 10, by Marcus Aurelius, introduces the work: "Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells." In the story, set "a good many years ago" in what is now Indonesia, a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s. Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised in Whitstable, Kent by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. 
   
  In 1915 he wrote Of Human Bondage, widely considered his masterpiece. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. During and after the war, he traveled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels.

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  Alexander Pushkin - A Short...

  Alexander Puschkin

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  Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on 26th May 1799 in Moscow into a family of Russian nobility. 
   
  Raised by nursemaids and French tutors in French he learnt Russian only via the household staff. 
   
  He graduated from the prestigious Imperial Lyceum, near St Petersburg and plunged into the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of what was then the capital of the Russian Empire.  
   
  In 1820, he published his first long poem, ‘Ruslan and Ludmila’, with much controversy about both subject and style.  Pushkin was heavily influenced by the French Enlightenment and gravitated, with other literary radicals, towards social reform angering the Government. 
   
  His early literary work and reputation was poetic and written as he travelled around the Empire or engaged himself in various rebellions against the Ottoman Empire.  A clash with his own government after his poem, ‘Ode to Liberty’, was found among the belongings of the Decembrist Uprising rebels meant two years of internal exile at his mother's rural estate.  His friends and family continually petitioned for his release, sending letters and meeting with Tsar Alexander I and then Tsar Nicholas I.   
   
  In 1825, whilst at his Mother’s estate, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama ‘Boris Godunov’.  
   
  Upon meeting with Tsar Nicholas I, Pushkin obtained his release and began work as the Tsar's Titular Counsel of the National Archives.  However, because of the earlier problems the tsar retained control of everything Pushkin published, and he was banned from travelling at will. 
   
  Around 1828, Pushkin met the 16-year-old Natalia Goncharova, one of the most talked-about beauties of Moscow.  After much hesitation, Natalia accepted his marriage proposal after she received assurances that the government had no intentions to persecute the libertarian poet.  When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, Gentleman of the Chamber, he became enraged, feeling that the Tsar intended to humiliate him. 
   
  In the year 1831, during Pushkin's growing literary influence, he met Nikolai Gogol.  Recognising his gifts Pushkin supported him and published his short stories in his own magazine ‘The Contemporary’. 
   
  By the autumn of 1836, Pushkin was falling into greater and greater debt and facing scandalous rumours that his wife was having an affair.  
   
  In January 1837, Pushkin sent a ‘highly insulting letter’ to his wife’s pursuer, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès.  The only answer could be a challenge to a duel. 
   
  It took place on 27th January.  D'Anthès fired first, critically wounding Pushkin; the bullet entered at his hip and penetrated his abdomen.  Two days later Alexander Pushkin died of peritonitis.  He was 37. 
   
  1 - Alexander Pushkin - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin 
  3 - The Blizzard by Alexander Pushkin 
  4 - The Stationmaster by Alexander Pushkin 
  5 - The Shot by Alexander Pushkin 
  6 - The Coffin Maker by Alexander Pushkin 
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  1 - Cornwall - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - Malachi's Cove by Anthony Trollope 
  3 - Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe 
  4 - The Screaming Skull by F Marion Crawford 
  5 - The Haunted Church by Frederick Cowles 
  6 - The Limping Ghost by Frederick Cowles 
  7 - In the Mist by Mary E Penn 
  8 - The Botathen Ghost from Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall by the Reverend R S Hawker 
  9 - Room For One by Frederick Cowles 
  10 - Colonel Benyon's Entanglement by Mary Elizabeth Braddon 
  11 - Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor House by Clara Venn

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  First Love

  Ivan Turgenev

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  "First Love" by Ivan Turgenev - a story about real feelings and play. Main character works are passionately in love with the princess, who older than him, but for her a careless young man - just an object of ridicule.
  Other famous works, such as "Asya", "Fathers and Sons", "A Nest of Noblemen", "Biryuk", "On the Eve", "Mumu", "Fire at Sea", "The Wayside Inn", "The Watch", "Three Portraits", "A Strange Story", "The Meeting", etc.
  Ivan Turgenev - an outstanding writer of the 19th century century, corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of Russian language and literature, author of philosophical and psychological poems, short stories, stories, and novels

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  Tono-Bungay - Book the Second:...

  H. G. Wells

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  Herbert George "H. G." Wells (1866 - 1946) was an English writer.
  He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a "father of science fiction"
  BOOK THE SECOND: THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY: I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish speck of frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of the sense of vast irrelevant movement. I do not remember my second coming to London as I do my first, for my early impressions, save that an October memory of softened amber sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on grey house fronts I know not where. That, and a sense of a large tranquillity.

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