Showing results for "Icon" in Historical

When Matthew Spear, a young curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, meets the lovely Ana Kessler, an art dealer who has inherited an impressive group of pieces, he discovers a prize:the collection includes the Holy Mother of Katarini -- a sacred icon long thought destroyed. But while Matthew...

Wuthering Heights is a fierce and haunting tale of love, vengeance, and the wild forces that shape the human heart. Set against the storm-lashed moors of northern England, the story follows the doomed and unforgettable bond between Heathcliff, a brooding foundling of mysterious origin, and Catherine Earnshaw, the restless young woman who becomes both his salvation and his torment.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ rises anew in this sweeping, unabridged presentation that restores Lew Wallace’s monumental epic to its full emotional, spiritual, and cinematic grandeur, telling the story of Judah Ben-Hur with a vividness and intensity that resonates far beyond its historical setting.

Cathy Kotsikas is as unsettled as anyone in postwar Britain. A hasty marriage has become an exhausting clash of personalities. Leon, her Greek husband, as charming as he is ruthless and self-centred, understands neither her mildly eccentric character nor her need for freedom. Cathy’s sanctuary is Sandlings, a remote cottage on the barren Suffolk coast left to her by her grandfather. For Leon, however, his business in London and the restoration of his family home in Greece are of paramount importance.

Austen’s genius lies in her ability to expose hypocrisy while championing sincerity, independence, and emotional honesty. Pride and Prejudice endures not only because it is a romance, but because it is a vibrant portrait of flawed, vivid people learning to see one another clearly.

Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a sweeping story of love, sacrifice, and redemption in an age of chaos and change. From the crowded streets of London to the shadowed alleys of revolutionary Paris, Dickens paints a vivid portrait of two cities—and the people whose lives are bound together by fate, injustice, and hope. At its heart lies a tale of deep human emotion: a man’s long imprisonment, a daughter’s unshakable devotion, and a love that transcends despair.

On a still December evening, Charles Dickens received a young London journalist at his home, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. The meeting had been arranged quietly, and Dickens, though clearly tired from his recent travels and public readings, welcomed his guest with courtesy and reserve.

Charles Dickens met privately with London journalist Jasper Reed Wharton at his home, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. Though his health was failing, he remained alert and ready to talk. The meeting lasted a little over an hour and covered both his personal reflections and his professional work. Dickens spoke in a straightforward way about the long years of writing that had defined his life. He discussed how certain characters had stayed with him more than others and how, over time, his view of his own books had changed.

Ben-Hur is a story of two very different heroes. Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Jerusalem, is involved in an accident to the Roman procurator which is taken to be intentional. He is seized and sent to the fleet as a galley-slave, while his family is imprisoned and the family goods confiscated. When Ben-Hur saves the fleet captain from drowning after his ship is sunk in a fight with pirates, that officer adopts him as son and heir.

Ostensibly a love story, the novel really revolves around a highly mythologized version of the Johnson County War in 1890's Wyoming ... The novel takes the side of the large ranchers, and depicts the lynchings as frontier justice, meted out by the protagonist, who is a member of a natural aristocracy among men. Owen Wister was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

There comes a time in the course of battle when a participant casts his fate to the gods of war, and carries on without question, the task at hand. Living, dying, right or wrong, can be contemplated later. The spirit of the bayonet takes over and carries the youth through the crucible of battle to emerge a short time later several ages older. Stephen Crane's classic novel gives us a glimpse into the mind of a young soldier as he passes through the experience he will never be able to forget, and possibly awaken him from his slumber in a sweat and panic for years to come.

Remember the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper? The Fox and the Sour Grapes? The Boy Who Cried Wolf? These wonderful tales and hundreds more have been passed down to us over the centuries. The man credited with writing them, Aesop, was an Ancient Greek slave born about 620 BC. Aesop is known as a fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables shining glaringly true light on our human foibles now collectively known as Aesop's Fables.