Other books that might interest you

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  On the Study of Words

  Richard Chenevix Trench

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  Where words come from and what they carry: Trench takes ordinary English — knave, villain, pagan, sincere — and shows the history fossilised inside each one, and what it says about the people who made it. In 1857 he read a paper on the deficiencies of English dictionaries that set in motion the project which became the Oxford English Dictionary; he was Archbishop of Dublin, and these lectures are why the OED exists.

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  The Blithedale Romance

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  The story takes place in a utopian community called Blithedale, which is based on Brook Farm, a real-life Transcendentalist community in Massachusetts where Hawthorne lived briefly. The protagonist, Miles Coverdale, is a young man who joins the community with hopes of living a simpler, more meaningful life. While there, he meets several unconventional characters, including Zenobia, a charismatic feminist; Priscilla, a mysterious and beautiful woman; and Hollingsworth, a driven social reformer with a dark past.

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  Sonnets for Contemplation -...

  William Shakespeare

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  Dramatic readings of selected Shakespeare sonnets by actor/director John Maloney.  Simply listen, or read along for enjoyment and illumination.

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  King Pest

  SAMPI Books, Edgar Allan Poe

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  "King Pest" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which two drunken sailors, Legs and Hugh, enter a strange house during a plague in London. There, they encounter a bizarre court led by King Pest and his grotesque entourage, resulting in strange and darkly funny events.

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  The Inspired 'Busman - From...

  Elinor Mordaunt

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  Evelyn May Clowes was born on 7th May 1872 in Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire.  
  Growing up in genteel circumstances, her early childhood was spent at Charlton Down House near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and her teenage years near Heythrop in the Cotswolds.  
  She was educated at home by governesses, excelling at German, Latin, Greek, shorthand, landscape painting, and fabric and wallpaper design. 
  In 1897 she went to Mauritius as companion to her cousin Caroline and in 1898 married Maurice Wilhemn Wiehe, the owner of a sugar plantation. She gave birth to two stillborn children. After a few years of marriage, she found life difficult and returned to England. Shortly afterwards she went by herself to Australia, arriving in June 1902 and gave birth to a son a few months later.   
  She lived in Melbourne for about eight years.  To earn a living she took on a wide and varied range of jobs; she edited a woman's fashion paper, wrote short stories and articles, made blouses, designed embroideries, tilled gardens, acted as a housekeeper, and did other artistic work. Her health was not strong, but she undertook any kind of work which would provide a living for herself and her infant son. This gained her an experience of life which was readily put to use in her literary works. 
  Her first book, ‘The Garden of Contentment’, was published in 1902 under her pen-name Elinor Mordaunt. It was the first of many works that covered fiction, short stories, travel and autobiography. 
  She changed her name by deed poll to Evelyn May Mordaunt on 1st July 1915 and gained a further reputation as a writer of short stories for magazines which display both her humour and sense of tragedy. Travel was always high on her priority and the experiences used not only for pleasure but in her writings and, as travel books, ideas in themselves.  
  On 27th January 1933 at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, she married a retired barrister from Gloucestershire. In her own words, the marriage ‘ended in tragedy.’ 
  Elinor Mordaunt died on 25th June 1942 at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. She was 70.

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  Father Goriot

  Honoré de Balzac

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  In a shabby Paris boarding house, an old vermicelli merchant sells his last silver to keep two daughters in gowns they will not thank him for, and a law student decides which way he intends to climb. Balzac worked nights on fifty cups of coffee a day and died at fifty-one; this is the novel where his Human Comedy locks together, and where Vautrin explains, at length, exactly how the world is run.

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