Penguin classics

"A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia. One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century and the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I, Gertrude Bell turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the...

"In Freud's view we are driven by the desire for pleasure as well as by the desire to avoid pain. But the pursuit has never been a simple thing. Pleasure can be a form of fear, a form of memory and a way of avoiding reality. Above all, as these essays show with remarkable eloquence, pleasure is a way in which we repeat ourselves." "The essays collected in this volume explore, in Freud's uniquely subtle and accessible style, the puzzles of pleasure...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

"With Candide, Voltaire bumptiously skewered the fashionable misinterpretation of the doctrine of philosophical optimism, unerringly offending kings, scientists, fanaticals, publishers, journalists, and even priests; composed in a mere three days, Candide's capacity to amuse, disgust, and surprise endures today, roughly ninety thousand days later. Theo Cuffe's new translation is invaluable for those English-speaking readers who cannot understand French,...

It can be said of very few books that the world was changed as a result of its publication - but this is certainly the case of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818-1883). Volume 1 appeared (in German) in 1867, and the two subsequent volumes appeared at later dates after the author's death - completed from extensive notes left by Marx himself. Marx, famously writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum, set out to draw...

Harvey Cheyne, the son of a millionaire, learns lessons about life, responsibility, determination, and self-reliance when, saved from drowning by a fishing schooner, he is forced to share the life and hard work of his rescuers.

Froissart (1337-1410), sometimes described as the historian of the Hundred Years' War, was one of the first great journalists. His Chronicles reveal the same curiosity about character and customs which underlies the works of his contemporary, Chaucer. This selection depicts a panorama of Europe during the great age of Anglo-French rivalry, from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart's famous descriptions of chivalry in...