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Seven Viking Romances
By Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, Hermann Palsson, Paul Edwards. 1985
Combining traditional myth, oral history and re-worked European legend to depict an ancient realm of heroism and wonder, the seven…
tales collected here are among the most fantastical of all the Norse romances. Powerfully inspired works of Icelandic imagination, they relate intriguing, often comical tales of famous kings, difficult gods and women of great beauty, goodness or cunning. The tales plunder a wide range of earlier literature from Homer to the French romances - as in the tale of the wandering hero Arrow-Odd, which combines several older legends, or Egil and Asmund, where the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops is skilfully adapted into a traditional Norse legend. These are among the most outrageous, delightful and exhilarating tales in all Icelandic literature.Sense and Sensibility (The Penguin English Library)
By Jane Austen. 2012
"The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom…
I can really love. I require so much!"Jane Austen's novel tells the story of Marianne Dashwood, who wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.The Sensational Toddler Sleep Plan: the step-by-step guide to getting your child the sleep that they need
By Alison Scott-Wright. 2021
*** WITH A FOREWORD BY MILLIE MACKINTOSH ***From the author of the hugely successful The Sensational Baby Sleep Plan.A follow-up…
guide, helping parents to handle sleep issues in toddlers and children aged over twelve months.With clear and realistic advice on how to: *Implement the fail-safe reassurance sleep-training technique*Establish healthy bedtime associations *Understand your toddler's development*Implement a routine through responsible and positive parenting *Manage changes such as moving from a cot to a bed and travelling *Cope with dietary intolerances and acid reflex that might affect child's ability to fall and stay asleep*Introduce a new baby into the family and deal with sibling issues This book will get your child - and you - the sleep you need!Praise for The Sensational Baby Sleep Plan:***** 'This book is a Godsend . . . simple, supportive and easy to apply.'***** 'Literally changes our lives . . . absolutely invaluable advice.'***** 'This books now allows our little one to enjoy her sleep . . . She is a happy content smiley baby now and so are mummy and daddy!'Selected Writings
By Gerard De Nerval. 2006
Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and…
madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings. This comprehensive selection of his works includes 'Aurélia', the memoir of his madness; the haunting novella of love and memory 'Sylvie' (considered to be a masterpiece by Proust); the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras'; as well as Nerval's experimental fictions and selections from his correspondence, which demonstrate his lucid awareness of how nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his fertile imagination to the status of mental illness. Together these pieces confirm Nerval's place as a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists and a vital model for such writers as Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.Selected Prose
By John Donne. 1987
This selection of John Donne's most powerful prose shows that the man remembered predominantly for his poetry was also a…
preacher, and a prose writer of extraordinary power. In it, he explores the metaphysical collision between poetry and religion, suicide and duty, the secular and the spiritual that characterized his times.Edited with an introduction and notes by Neil Rhodes.Selected Poems: Tennyson
By Alfred Lord Tennyson. 2007
Tennyson's poetry epitomizes the Victorian age, for which he became a spokesman. His finest poems are often steeped in a…
sensuous melancholy, as in Maud, or are chivaric, heroic and allegorical, as in The Lady of Shalot and Morte d'Arthur.Selected Poems: Donne
By John Donne. 2006
Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures…
of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Selected Poems reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful Songs and Sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as 'The Flea', which transforms the image of a louse into something marvellous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigour into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.Selected Poems and Letters
By Arthur Rimbaud. 2004
A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet.…
During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body of poems that range from the exquisite to the obsene, while simultaneously living a life of dissolute excess with his lover and fellow poet, Verlaine. At the age of 21, he abandonned poetry and travelled across Europe before settling in Africa as an arms trader. This edition sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a sparkling translation of his most exhilarating poetry and a generous selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.Selected Poems: Selected Poems And Prose
By Charles-Pierre Baudelaire. 1972
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by…
French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.Selected Poems
By Alfred Lord Tennyson. 2003
'Tennyson', wrote T. S. Eliot, 'has the finest ear of any English poet since Milton,' and his verse remains unrivalled…
in its combination of verbal richness, emotional depth and intellectual engagement. Tennyson drew on classical and medieval legends in poems like 'The Lotos-Eaters' (1832) and 'The Lady of Shalott' (1832) to explore the spiritual tensions of the nineteenth century. In one of the great works of his maturity, 'In Memoriam' (1850) - written after the loss of his dearest friend - Tennyson vividly negotiated contemporary scepticism and the modern sciences of geology and evolution. Similar ground is covered in a dramatically darker mood in 'Maud' (1855), a poignant account of psychological disintegration.Selected Poems
By Lord Byron. 1996
Described as 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron was the…
quintessential Romantic. Flamboyant, charismatic and brilliant, he remains almost as notorious for his life - as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller - as he does for his literary work. Yet he produced some of the most daring and exuberant poetry of the Romantic age, from 'To Caroline' and 'To Woman' to the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, his exotic Eastern tales and the colourful narrative of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that made him famous overnight and gave birth to the idea of the brooding Byronic hero.Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
By Fernando Pessoa. 1974
The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate…
personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.Selected Poems
By John Burnside. 2006
Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic…
corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. In this Selected Poems we can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and continuity.This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes intimate, resonant, exquisite music.Selected Poems
By Matthew Sweeney. 2002
Representing the best of ten books and twenty years' work, Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into…
his strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are coming to the work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift - almost without your noticing - from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising. These are the secret, spiky narratives from the arch story-teller, the mixer of hilarity and menace, the past-master of fractured realism. The world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination.'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in…
a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817.In a period of great letter-writing, Keats's letters are outstanding. They begin in summer 1816, as he approached his twenty-first birthday, and were written over the next four years until his early death. Viewed together, they give the fullest and most poignant record we have of Keats's ambitions and hopes as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his brothers and young sister, and, later, his passionate, jealous and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne.Keats enclosed many of his poems with his letters, and read together, they offer an incomparable insight into his creative process and development as a poet. This major new edition edited by Professor John Barnard includes an introduction and notes, as well as a map of Keats's Scottish walking tour and reproductions of his letters.John Keats was born in October 1795. His Poems appeared in 1817, while Endymion was published in 1818, both to mixed reviews. In 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the major odes, Lamia and the Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing his 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821, in a rented apartment next to the Spanish Steps, at the age of twenty-five.John Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds and has edited The Complete Poems of Keats for Penguin Classics.The Secret History of the Mongols
By Christopher P. Atwood. 2023
A new translation of a great historical epic, recounting the turbulent life and times of Chinggis Khan'Bear the sword andHew…
asunder high and haughty necksSlash apart all strong and self-willed shoulders'Born poor into a world of dangers and hardships, Chinggis (or Genghis) Khan would grow up to unify Mongolia and conquer a vast empire stretching from modern-day Beijing to Baghdad. The Secret History of the Mongols, written after Chinggis's death in the thirteenth century, is a great historical saga recounting not only his turbulent life and times, but that of his loved ones, ancestors and heirs. This remarkable new translation of the earliest surviving work written in Mongolian gives insight into a world of warlords, kinship, horses, yurts, shamans and vast landscapes, where bloody battles and violent family conflicts are impelled by Heaven's destiny.Translated with an introduction by Christopher P. AtwoodThe Secret History
By Procopius. 1966
A trusted member of the Byzantine establishment, Procopius was the Empire's official chronicler, and his History of the Wars of…
Justinian proclaimed the strength and wisdom of the Emperor's reign. Yet all the while the dutiful scribe was working on a very different - and dangerous - history to be published only once its author was safely in his grave. The Secret History portrays the 'great lawgiver' Justinian as a rampant king of corruption and tyranny, the Empress Theodora as a sorceress and whore, and the brilliant general Belisarius as the pliable dupe of his scheming wife Antonina. Magnificently hyperbolic and highly opinionated, The Secret History is a work of explosive energy, depicting holy Byzantium as a hell of murder and misrule.The Second World War: An Illustrated History
By James Holland. 2023
Discover the story of the Second World War brought to life in full colour by renowned historian James Holland and…
award-winning artist Keith Burns'A fully immersive experience. A comprehensive yet fast-paced and gripping insight into the Second World War. Not just accessible, but riveting. An absolute pleasure to read' GET HISTORY'A ground-breaking collaboration between bestselling historian James Holland and award-winning artist Keith Burns presents the war in full colour, bringing the text vividly to life' HISTORY OF WAR__________From the great cities of Europe to the jungles of Burma, and from the deserts of North Africa to the remote islands of the South Pacific and the freezing waters of the Arctic, the Second World War touched every continent and ocean on the planet. And from the Blitzkrieg to the atom bomb, the fighting fuelled new technological development on land, at sea and in the air at a ferocious pace. Our future was forged by war.Combining compelling personal stories with a clear and accessible appreciation of the strategic and operational battle for supremacy between the Allies and the Axis powers, bestselling historian James Holland weaves an irresistible narrative, with over 250 illustrations by acclaimed artist Keith Burns, commissioned specially for this project.Together, they bring events in The Second World War: An Illustrated History to life with stunning drama and dynamism.Over five years in the making, their groundbreaking collaboration has produced a unique and unforgettable account of the most extraordinary events the world has ever seen.__________'Gripping text, masterful imagery and touching personal stories make this a must-buy for anyone with an interest in World War Two' CLASSIC MILITARY VEHICLES'A bold attempt to expand the market for military history . . . aimed at a general reader who wants to get an overall grasp of a massive subject . . . this is an impressive achievement' BOOKBRUNCHSebastian Faulks: The Essential Guide (Vintage Living Texts #12)
By Jonathan Noakes, Margaret Reynolds. 2002
In Vintage Living Texts teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Sebastian Faulks. This guide…
will deal with his themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will be accompanied with likely exam questions, and contexts and comparisons - as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.Scott on Waterloo
By Sir Walter Scott. 2015
On the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo discover a fascinating primary source: Walter Scott's accounts of his journey…
to the battlefieldIn the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo tourists flocked from Britain to witness the scene of the most important conflict of their generation. Walter Scott was among them, and with a commission from his publisher for a travel book and a long poem. These prose and verse accounts bring to vivid life the carnage, spectacle and excitement of a fascinating period of European history. Brilliantly introduced and annotated by Paul O'Keeffe, this edition elucidates and contextualises Scott's first-hand account of his travels, his dashing epic, ‘The Field of Waterloo’ and the eerily chilling 'Dance of Death'.