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Книги издательства «Wordsworth»
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«Julius Caesar» is among the best of Shakespeare's historical and political plays. Dealing with events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the drama vividly illustrates the ways in which power and corruption are linked. The cry 'Peace, freedom and liberty!' is used to exculpate brutal realities, while personal ambitions taint public actions. Rich in characterization and replete with eloquent rhetoric, «Julius Caesar» remains engrossing and topical: a play for today.» |
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«The «Jungle Book» introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents, and of the friendship between the man-cub and Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the sleepy brown bear, who instructs Mowgli in the Laws of the Jungle. «The Second Jungle Book» contains some of the most thrilling of the Mowgli stories. It includes «Red Dog», in which Mowgli forms an unlikely alliance with the python Kaa, «How Fear Came» and «Letting in the Jungle» as well as «The Spring Running», which brings Mowgli to manhood and the realisation that he must leave Bagheera, Baloo and his other friends for the world of man.» |
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These witty stories were originally told by Rudyard Kipling to his own children. In them he gives fanciful accounts of how and why things came to be as they are. Generations of children have delighted to learn how the Leopard got his spots, how the Elephant's Child on the banks of the great grey-green Limpopo acquired his trunk with the help of the Crocodile, and the beginning of the Armadillos. |
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Rene Descartes (1569-1650), the 'father' of modern philosophy, is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history: his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity. Breaking with the conventions of his own time and suffering persecution by the Church as a consequence, Descartes in his writings — most of which are philosophical classics — attempted to answer the central questions surrounding the self, God, free-will and knowledge, using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith. This edition, the most comprehensive one-volume selection of Descartes' works available in English, includes his great essay, Discourse on Method. |
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This novel tells the story of Kimball O'Hara (Kim), who is the orphaned son of a soldier in the Irish regiment stationed in India during the British Raj. It describes Kim's life and adventures from street vagabond, to his adoption by his father's regiment and recruitment into espionage. |
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«King Lear» has been widely acclaimed as Shakespeare's most powerful tragedy. Elemental and passionate, it encompasses the horrific and the heart-rending. Love and hate, loyalty and treachery, cruelty and self-sacrifice: all these contend in a tempestuous drama which has become an enduring classic of the world's literature.» |
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Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling’s memoir of his writing life, was composed in the year before he died and published posthumously. Its spare, polished phrases and masterly anecdotes offer a unique insight into the mind of this divided man who upheld the Victorian imperialist values of duty, patriotism and obedience, and yet sympathized with outlaws and children. Kipling describes with unforgettable vividness his bitter childhood years in the ‘House of Desolation’, his apprenticeship to the craft of writing through the hard grind of journalism in British India, his beloved parents and his pride in his own work. Reissued with a new introduction by Jan Montefiore, author of the brilliant recent study ‘Rudyard Kipling’, this memoir is indispensable reading not only for Kipling admirers, but for anyone who cares about the art and craft of writing. |
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The flaxen-haired beauty of the child-like Lady Audley would suggest that she has no secrets. But M.E. Braddon's classic novel of sensation uncovers the truth about its heroine in a plot involving bigamy, arson and murder. It challenges assumptions about the nature of femininity and investigates the narrow divide between sanity and insanity, using as its focus one of the most fascinating of all Victorian heroines. Combining elements of the detective novel, the psychological thriller and the romance of upper class life, Lady Audley's Secret was one of the most popular and successful novels of the nineteenth century. |
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With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition to the general public. The famous ‘trial of Lady Chatterley’ heralded the sexual revolution of the coming decades and signalled the defeat of Establishment prudery. Yet Lawrence himself was hardly a liberationist and the conservativism of many aspects of his novel would later lay it open to attacks from the political avant-garde and from feminists. The story of how the wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley responds when her husband returns from the war paralysed from the waist down, and of the tender love which then develops between her and her husband’s gamekeeper, is a complex one open to a variety of conflicting interpretations. This edition of the novel offers an occasion for a new generation of readers to discover what all the fuss was about; to appraise Lawrence’s bitter indictment of modern industrial society, and to ask themselves what lessons there might be for the 21st century in his intense exploration of the complicated relations between love and sex. |
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«The Last Man» is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of «Vindication of the Rights of Woman», and the radical philosopher William Godwin. Her mother died ten days after her birth and the young child was educated through contact with her father's intellectual circle and her own reading. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812; they eloped in July 1814.In the summer of 1816 she began her first and most famous novel, «Frankenstein». Three of her children died in early infancy and in 1822 her husband was drowned. Mary returned to England with her surviving son and wrote novels, short stories and accounts of her travels; she was the first editor of P.B.Shelley's poetry and verse.» |
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The proverbial phrase ‘life’s little ironies’ was coined by Hardy for his third volume of short stories. These tales and sketches possess all the power of his novels: the wealth of description, the realistic portrayal of the quaint lore of Wessex, the ‘Chaucerian’ humour and characterisation, the shrewd and critical psychology, the poignant estimate of human nature and the brooding sense of wonder at the essential mystery of life. The tales which make up Life's Little Ironies tenderly re-create a rapidly vanishing rural world and scrutinise the repressions of fin-de-siecle bourgeois life. They share the many concerns of Hardy's last great novels, such as the failure of modern marriage and the insidious effects of social ambition on the family and community life. Ranging widely in length and complexity, they are unified by Hardy's quintessential irony, which embraces both the farcical and the tragic aspects of human existence. |
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Motherless Sara Crewe was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin's. Her father was immensely rich and she became 'show pupil' — a little princess. Then her father dies and his wealth disappears, and Sara has to learn to cope with her changed circumstances. Her strong character enables her to fight successfully against her new-found poverty and the scorn of her fellows. |
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Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus, the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to bedchamber — their intrigues, their loves and their deaths. Himself a court official, he quotes from a variety of sources, from the official and private documents as well as from old anecdotes, gossip, songs and jokes, giving an unparalleled oblique view of his subjects. Long familiar to students of classics, he found a new audience as the main source for Robert Graves' novels and the subsequent television series I, Claudius. |
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«London Labour and the London Poor» is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. To pass from one to the other, writes one authority, is to cross sides of the same street.» |
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First published in 1900, Lord Jim established Conrad as one of the great storytellers of the twentieth century. Set in the Malay Archipelago, the novel not only provides a gripping account of maritime adventure and romance, but also an exotic tale of the East. Its themes also challenge the conventions of nineteenth-century adventure fiction, confirming Conrad’s place in literature as one of the first ‘modernists’ of English letters. Lord Jim explores the dilemmas of conscience, of moral isolation, of loyalty and betrayal confronting a sensitive individual whose romantic quest for an honourable ideal are tested to the limit. |
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«Lorna Doone», a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent time of Monmouth's rebellion (1685). It is also a moving love story told through the life of the young farmer John Ridd, as he grows to manhood determined to right the wrongs in his land, and to win the heart and hand of the beautiful Lorna Doone.» |
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Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) constituted a quiet poetic revolution, both in its attitude to its subject-matter and its anti-conventional language. Those volumes and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's other major poems were central to the Romantic period and remain classic texts in our own time. Wordsworth focuses on the essential passions of the heart and achieves a penetrating insight into love and death, solitude and community. Coleridge explores a more fantastic and dreamlike imagination, and also writes poems of quiet, conversational mediation. Both poets look with a fresh and visionary eye at the human and natural world. They examine the condition of men and women at the extreme edge of society: they are also subtle analysts of their own minds and the processes of introspection and memory. This volume contains all of Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Wordsworth's Preface of 1800/1802, and a wide ranging selection of both poets other work across their poetic careers, including virtually all their best known and most discussed shorter poems. |
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Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction. Flaubert’s protagonist in particular has never ceased to fascinate. Romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate protester against the conventions of bourgeois society, simultaneously the subject of Flaubert’s admiration and the butt of his irony — Emma Bovary remains one of the most enigmatic of fictional creations. Flaubert's meticulous approach to the craft of fiction, his portrayal of contemporary reality, his representation of an unforgettable cast of characters make Madame Bovary one of the major landmarks of modern fiction. |
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Maggie is an astonishing novel of social realism, which parallels many of today's ills. Set in the urban squalor of New York in the 1890s, it follows the careers of the innocent Maggie and her brother Jimmie, children of brutal and drunken parents. It is a tour-de-force equal to The Red Badge of Courage. Also included in this volume are seven of Stephen Crane's short stories. The Monster is a novelette which provides a bitter commentary on man's inhumanity to man; The Blue Hotel, a tale of murder in a small Nebraska town; His New Mittens, which concerns the reflections of a runaway boy, is followed by four stories of sensation and excitement. |
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«This anthology of Rudyard Kipling's greatest short stories contains some of the most memorable and popular examples of the genre of which he was an undisputed master. «The Man Who Would be King» is a classic tale of adventure as the opportunistic, renegade and vagabond pair of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan attempt to establish themselves at the level of god and king over the primitive people of Kafiristan. Other famous short stories included are: «Only a Subaltern», «The Phantom Rickshaw», «Wee Willie Winkie», and «Baa Baa Black Sheep».» |
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