‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest — Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’ Treasure Island is a tale of pirates and villains, maps, treasure and shipwreck, and is perhaps the best adventure story ever written.It begins at the old ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn where a strange seaman, Billy Bones, has taken up room and board. When the seaman is struck down and dies, young Jim Hawkins, the son of the landlord, finds a packet in Billy’s sea chest, lie could not know that the map he discovers would lead him to unimaginable adventures and treasure. Shipping as cabin boy on the Hispaniola, he sails with Squire Trelawney, Captain Smollett, Dr Livesev, the sinister Long John Silver and a frightening ragtag crew to far off Treasure Island. There, mutiny, murder and mayhem lead to a thrilling climax.

William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art.Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’ was completed in 1805, but was not published until after his death, and it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne’s influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, by the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne has become the heroine of her own story.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the twentieth century. On economic theory, he ranks with Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? as a student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for ‘Free Trade and free thought’. Keynes’s limpid style, concise prose, and vivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive — as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and large disparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, ‘the most powerful instrument to better the future’, be safeguarded. The twenty-first century may yet prove him right.In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was voted as the academic book which has had the greatest impact on modern Britain, during Academic Book Week (23-28 January 2017).

With an Introduction by A.D.P. Briggs, translation by Constance Garnett. In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking people Russian society at the time. The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their naivety, ludicrous single-mindedness and readiness for murder and destruction, might seem exaggerated — until we consider their all-too-recognisable descendants in the real world ever since. The key figure in the novel, however, is beyond politics. Nikolay Stavrogin, another product of rationalism run wild, exercises his charisma with ruthless authority and total amorality. His unhappiness is accounted for when he confesses to a ghastly sexual crime — in a chapter long suppressed by the censor. This prophetic account of modern morals and politics, with its fifty-odd characters, amazing events and challenging ideas, is seen by some critics as Dostoevskys masterpiece.Издание на английском языке.

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in «Dubliners» show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people simply striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.Издание на английском языке.

Goethe’s Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life’s work of Germany’s greatest poet. Beginning with an intriguing wager between God and Satan, it charts the life of a deeply flawed individual, his struggle against the nihilism of his diabolical companion Mephistopheles. Part One presents Faust’s pact with the Devil and the harrowing tragedy of his love affair with the young Gretchen. Part Two shows Faust’s experience in the world of public affairs, including his encounter with Helen of Troy, the emblem of classical beauty and culture. The whole is a symbolic and panoramic commentary on the human condition and on modern European history and civilisation. This new translation of both parts of Faust preserves the poetic character of the original, its tragic pathos and hilarious comedy. In addition, John Williams has translated the Urfaust, a fascinating glimpse into the young Goethe’s imagination, and a selection from the draft scenarios for the Walpurgis Night witches’ sabbath — material so ribald and blasphemous that Goethe did not dare publish it.

Translated by Constance Garnett.With an introduction by A. Briggs.

Aristotle (384-322BC) is the philosopher who has most influence on the development of western culture, writing on a wide variety of subjects including the natural sciences as well as the more strictly philosophical topics of logic, metaphysics and ethics. To the poet Dante, he was simply ‘the master of those who know’.The Ethics contains his views on what makes a good human life. While the work continues to stimulate and challenge modern philosophers, the general course of the argument is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Both as a key influence in the history of ideas and as a work containing unique insights into the human condition, this is a book that simply demands to be read.

William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets. His writing attracted the astonished admiration of authors as diverse as Wordsworth, Ruskin, W.B.Yeats, and more recently beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the ‘flower power’ generation. He is one of England’s most original artists whose works aim to liberate imaginative energies and subvert ‘the mind-forged manacles’ of restriction.This volume contains many of his writings, including: ‘Songs of Innocence’, ‘Songs of Experience’, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, and a generous selection from the Prophetic Books including ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

With an Introduction by Alex Dolby. Translation by W.H.G. Kingston. Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the world and provided means to escape from it. The collective enthusiasm of generations of readers of his ‘extraordinary voyages’ was a key factor in the rise of modern science fiction. In The Mysterious Island a group of men escape imprisonment during the American Civil War by stealing a balloon. Blown across the world, they are air-wrecked on a remote desert island. In a manner reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe, the men apply their scientific knowledge and technical skill to exploit the island’s bountiful resources, eventually constructing a sophisticated society in miniature. The book is also an intriguing mystery story, for the island has a secret.

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s later romantic comedies, offers a striking and challenging mixture of tragic and violent events, lyrical love-speeches, farcical comedy, pastoral song and dance, and, eventually, dramatic revelations and reunions. Thematically, there is a rich orchestration of the contrasts between age and youth, corruption and innocence, decline and regeneration. Both Leontes’ murderous jealousy and Perdita’s love-relationship with Florizel are eloquently intense. In the theatre, The Winter’s Tale often proves to be diversely entertaining and deeply moving.

Книга «The Nutcracker». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2026. Серия: Collector`s Editions. Автор: Hoffmann Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.

‘Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?’ So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Ilolv Land in June 1S67.His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. lie was making his first responses to the Old World — to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii. Constantinople. Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem. Nazareth and Bethlehem.For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the ‘Old Masters’. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf’s last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation.Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing compelling existentialist and psychological themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Read together, these novels illuminate each other in ways that will engage both the student and the general reader.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work.The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante’s protagonist — and his reader — meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.

The captivating Irish stories collected in this new edition include both comic tales such as ‘Paddy O’Kelly and the Weasel’, and tales of heroes from ancient literature such as ‘How Cormac Mac Art went to Faery’. By turns funny, fantastical and mysterious, the stories are matched in liveliness by the original illustrations of John D. Batten. It would be hard to find a better introduction for children to the special magic of Celtic storytelling.The stories in this book are taken from Joseph Jacob’s classic two-volume collection Celtic Fairy Tales (1891-2) and More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894).

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 characterisation and replete with eloquent rhetoric, Julius Caesar remains engrossing and topical: a play for today.Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.

Книга «The Iliad». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2023. Серия: Classics. Переплет: Мягкий переплет. Количество страниц: 425. Автор: Homer. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his ‘very self’ into his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman’s greatness, described him as ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’.For anyone interested in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yeats’s work is essential. This volume gathers the full range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today as eloquently as ever.

This book is edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, research Professor of English, University of Sussex.The Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare’s works. The Textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.

‘I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be’. wrote Byron (1788-1824) in his comic masterpiece Don Juan, which follows the adventures of the hero across the Europe and near East which Byron knew so well, touching on the major political, cultural and social concerns of the day.This selection includes all of that poem, and selections from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the satirical poems ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ and ‘A Vision of Judgement’. Paul Wright’s detailed introductions place Byron’s colourful life and work within their broader social and political contexts, and demonstrate that Byron both fostered and critiqued the notorious ‘Byronic myth’ of heroic adventure, political action and sexual scandal.

Книга «White Nights; Poor Folk; The Double (NEW)». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2025. Серия: Classics. Переплет: Мягкий переплет. Количество страниц: 304. Автор: Dostoevsky Fyodor. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.

Книга «Animal Farm». Издательство: Wordsworth. Год выпуска: 2025. Серия: Collector`s Editions. Переплет: Твердый переплет. Количество страниц: 144. Автор: Orwell George. Стандарт: 10. Возрастная категория: отсутствует. Страна производитель: Соединенное королевство.