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The sonnets are a collection numbering 154 poems dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality. They were probably written over a long period of Shakespeare's life up until 1609, when they were first printed. The first 17 poems, traditionally referred to as the "procreation sonnets", are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it on to his descendants.

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature.

I know you don’t want to talk sometimes. Sometimes because it hurts and sometimes because you’re just not supposed to talk about what you want to talk about. Sometimes it can be hard to say, “this is beautiful,” when no one else can see what you see. Or, “Here, this is where the pain is.” But some part of you knows, the truth about the words you cannot say is that they only hurt until you say them. They only hurt until the person who needs to hear them, hears them.

Autobiographical sketches and stories from India's best-loved writer in English. For over four decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his...

Jessica Raine stars in all four BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations of John Galsworthy's Forsyte novels. An irresistible family saga of love, money and betrayal, The Forsytes: The Complete Series encompasses four acclaimed BBC Radio 4 productions of Galsworthy's perennially popular epic, spanning 50 years from 1886 to 1936.

The acclaimed BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Anthony Trollope's gently satirical tales of provincial life One of the most respected, successful chroniclers of nineteenth-century life, Anthony Trollope is still widely read and much-loved today. The Barchester Chronicles - witty moral comedies with...

Meeting by chance at a gambling hall in Europe, the separate lives of Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth are immediately intertwined. Daniel, an Englishman of uncertain parentage, becomes Gwendolyn's redeemer as she finds herself drawn to his spiritual and altruistic nature after a loveless marriage. But Daniel's path was already set when he rescued a young Jewess from suicide.

One of the best-known Irish playwrights, John Millington Synge premiered The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. It immediately provoked controversy, eventually resulting in the infamous "Playboy" riots. It has been recorded and adapted many times, but this timeless recording stars the Irish actors who made it a classic, including Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It are usually regarded as Shakespeare’s crowning achievements in the world of mirth and humor. In this group of plays, written during the playwright’s Second Period (1595–1600), the author depicts chiefly the cheerful, energetic side...

This is the story of Kitty Fane, the adulterous wife of a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. When her husband discovers her deception, he exacts a terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic in China.

'The Waste Land' is a landmark in 20th-century poetry. Here it is read by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Published in 1922, it is a brilliant exploration of a faithless, immoral society trying to rebuild itself after the devastation of the Great War. Rich in literary references and steeped in allusive and evocative imagery, 'The Waste Land' is widely considered to be the pinnacle of modernist poetry.

This Audiobook contains the following works : 1. Little women by Louisa May Alcott Start at Chapters 1, 2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Start at Chapters 48, 3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Start at Chapters 109, 4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Start at Chapters 152, 5. The Odyssey by Homer Start at Chapters 186, 6. A Tales of Two Cities Start at Chapters 210, 7. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Start at Chapters 255, 8. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Start at Chapters 268.

A spirited factory worker on a mission. A nerdy manager with a propensity for puzzles. An unexpected adventure. Charmingly British and off-beat, Miscellaneous 0125 is a story about following your dreams, healing past traumas, and the joy of truly being understood.

From his remarkable debut The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes was a colossal presence in the English literary landscape. He was also admired as a performer of his own work. Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes' masterful versions of stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, includes those of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe as well as many others.

Two archive BBC Radio programmes in which Judi Dench and Michael Williams, accompanied by friends John Moffatt and Alec McCowen, read a cornucopia of poetry and prose. In this enchanting pair of programmes from 1991 and 1996, Dame Judi Dench and husband Michael Williams shared an eclectic...

The verse of the English Romantic poets is as daunting in its scope and complexity as it is dazzling in its technique and beautiful in its language. Now, in a series of 24 incisive lectures by an honored and distinguished teacher, scholar, and author, you can grasp how England's finest Romantic voices created their masterpieces.

As they recount the events surrounding the disappearance of their toddler—one with a tendency to bite—two parents cope with grief in vastly different ways. While the father wrestles with feelings of guilt, the mother is convinced she’s spotted the boy in frightening TV news reports...though let’s just say he looks nothing like the precocious little boy they remember from a decade ago.

Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis' classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues that "good reading", like moral action or religious experience, involves surrender to the work in hand and a process of entering fully into the opinions of others: "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself."

As one of the first female reporters on 1880s Fleet Street, Penny Green has her work cut out. Whether it's investigating the mysterious death of a friend or reporting on a serial killer in the slums, Penny must rely on her wits and determination to discover the truth. Fortunately she can rely on the help of Inspector James Blakely of Scotland Yard, but will their relationship remain professional?