Other books that might interest you

• 

  Les Misérables - Volume 4: The...

  Victor Hugo

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, and letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.VOLUME 4: THE IDYLL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE ST. DENIS: 1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories.

  Show book

• 

  Bats in the Belfry

  Harry Graham

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Harry Graham (1874 - 1936) made a great name for himself as a writer of light verse and humorous stories, including the inimitable Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes.Bats in the Belfry is a humorous short story in the tradition of the Victorian bedroom farce. Percy Biffin, an awkward house-guest at the summer residence of Sir Borwick Trout, is unexpectedly called on in the middle of the night to remove a bat from the beautiful young Julia Trout's bedroom. His presence in the young lady's bedroom is misinterpreted by every person who learns of it...and the more Biffin tries to extricate himself, the worse the situation becomes.

  Show book

• 

  The 930 Up Train

  Sabine Baring-Gould

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was a British writer, clergyman and member of the landed gentry, having inherited an estate of 3,000 acres. While a young curate, he met and fell in love with a beautiful 16-year-old mill worker. He paid for her education and married her, and they subsequently had 15 children. Their relationship formed the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which was turned into the musical My Fair Lady. 
  Baring-Gould's strangest and most enduring works are those which are based on fantastical medieval myths and folklore. "The 9.30 Up Train" is a peculiar ghost story about a strange ghost which haunts both the road near the railway station and also a particular carriage of the train itself.

  Show book

• 

  Scarlet & Black

  Stendahl

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Contemptuous of life as a carpenter’s son in his native town of Verrieres, Julien Sorel dreams of a fame as great as Napoleon’s. To this end he assumes many guises – celibate priest, self-effacing secretary and keen Royalist.  He also impresses two very different women, Madame de Renal and Mathilde de la Mole, with disastrous consequences. Throughout the drama, Stendahl ironically records Julien’s absurd moral code and the corruptness of the world he strives to conquer. No matter how charming the rest of this tragicomedy; the final act is bloody.

  Show book

• 

  Letters of Travel (Unabridged)

  Rudyard Kipling

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Letters of Travel comprises three books: From Tideway to Tideway 1892-95 contains pieces first published in the Times covering voyages across north America (USA and Canada) and in Japan; his Letters to the Family first appeared in the Morning Post, while Nash's Magazine was the first publisher of the articles (on Egypt and Sudan) in Egypt of the Magicians. Kipling's observations are cast in a wry style that permits, as his work often does, different readings. The unsympathetic reader can hear a banal repetition of the patriarchal, racist and imperialist ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century trotted out. (Or even in his characterisation of the Jewish power behind the pedlar in "The Face of the Desert" a suggestion of something worse.) A more nuanced reading will perceive an amused or wry smile in Kipling's remembering and the human sympathy that infuses all his writing. (US listeners should be warned that in Kipling's day "the N word" was in common use, and he therefore uses it naturally to describe people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.)

  Show book

• 

  Lady of the Shroud The (Unabridged)

  Bram Stoker

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The Lady of the Shroud is a novel by Bram Stoker, published by William Heinemann in 1909.The book is an epistolary novel, narrated in the first person via letters and diary extracts from various characters, but mainly Rupert. The initial sections, leading up to the reading of the uncle's will, told by other characters, suggest that Rupert is the black sheep of the family, and the conditions of having to live in the castle in the Blue Mountains for a year before he can permanently inherit the unexpectedly large million-pound estate suggest the uncle is somehow testing the heir.

  Show book