Search results for ""Everyman""

The moonstone is a yellow diamond of unearthly beauty brought from India and given to Rachel Verrinder as an eighteenth birthday present, but the fabled diamond carries with it a terrible curse.

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Amy Dorrit's father is not very good with money. She was born in the Marshalsea debtors' prison and has lived there with her family for all of her twenty-two years, only leaving during the day to work as a seamstress for the forbidding Mrs. Clennam. But Amy's fortunes are about to change: the arrival of Mrs. Clennam's son Arthur, back from working in China, heralds the beginning of stunning revelations not just about Amy but also about Arthur himself.

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The story of the mysterious indictment, trial and reckoning forced upon Kafka’s Joseph K. is one of the twentieth century’s master parables which has influenced almost every major writer since. By rendering the absurd and the terrifying with scrupulous factual accuracy and evenness of tone, Kafka presents the world we recognize in a gripping narrative which is also a revelation of its hidden significance.

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Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of "Villette", achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief.

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Set in the Caucasus, the scene of Russia's military campaigns in the 19th century, this is both an adventure story and a sardonic look at the heroic ideals of the author's contemporaries - which makes it all the more ironic that the main character, Pushkin, (like the author) was killed in a duel.

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A story which evokes a bygone rural life, and is charged with a personal passion that intensifies the novel's outer dramas of seduction and betrayal and inner dramas of moral growth and redemption.

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Middlemarch- A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

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Donne created new forms of lyric, satire, elegiac and religious verse, and his independence of view, compact manner of expression encompassing conflicting moods, impassioned paradox, outbreaks of cynicism and wry humour make his work particularly appealing to the twentieth-century mind. His poetry reflects every stage of his development from the piratical Jack Donne who sailed with Ralegh against the Spaniards and spent riotous nights in the London streets, to the penitent John Donne who became Dean of St Paul's and the most celebrated preacher of his age. C. A. Patrides' edition of Donne's English poems is undoubtedly the most complete and scholarly available.

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From ancient Greece and Rome (Sappho, Marcellus Empiricus) to the current Covid 19 crisis (Eavan Boland's 'Quarantine'), poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing is a small treasury of their words, illuminating many different experiences of illness, injury and convalescence, from John Donne's 'Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse' to Thom Gunn's 'The Man with Night Sweats'; from Anne Finch's 'Spleen' to Jane Kenyon's 'Prognosis'; from Emily Dickinson's 'The Soul has Bandaged moments' to Seamus Heaney's 'Miracle'. Here are poems from around the world, by Baudelaire, Hugo, Rudaki and Cavafy; by Masaoka Shiki, Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert. Shakespeare and Milton; Tennyson and Emily Bronte; Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Tony Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy are all present at the sickbed. Messages of hope in the midst of pain - in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World', Wislawa Szymborska's 'The End and the Beginning' and Stevie Smith's 'Away, Melancholy' - make this a perfect gift for anyone on the road to healing.

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For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them— and poets have long chronicled the relationship. In this collection, Robert Frost’s “Birches,” Marianne Moore’s “The Camperdown Elm,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars,” and Zbigniew Herbert’s “Sequoia” stand tall beside Eugenio Montale’s “The Lemon Trees,” Yves Bonnefoy’s “The Apples,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Plum Tree,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Almond Tree,” and A. E. Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or ?owering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.

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As a young man Pope shot to fame with The Rape of the Lock, a light-hearted mock-heroic poem about a trivial society scandal, still his best remembered work. Wit and irony, dazzling technical mastery - he perfected the English heroic couplet - acute social observation and insight into human nature were to become the hallmarks of his verse.Pope is one of the most quoted of English poets - 'For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread', 'A little learning is a dangerous thing', 'To err is human, to forgive, divine', all originate from his pen. While his poetry generally has suffered some neglect in recent decades, Professor Claude Rawson's selection persuasively demonstrates why it should be back in fashion.He aspired to make out of verse satire a serious and dignified form, and his culminating work, The Dunciad, achieves a tragic gravity which transcends its satirical mockeries. An elevated and ironic reflection on culture, it created a new genre which led eventually to the modern masterpiece of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.Pope was a precocious talent and anxious to advertise the fact, inserting such subtitles as “Done by the Author at 12 years old” into his early published poems. He adopted many poetic forms, and this anthology includes graceful and witty lyrics, verse letters to friends in the Horatian mode, a number of devotional poems, and a variety of important discursive poems on literary and political themes, including An Essay on Criticism, Windsor-Forest, and An Essay on Man. This edition uses the text of the Oxford Standard Authors edition by Herbert Davis of Pope’s Poetical Works, 1966. Complete poems rather than excerpts have been selected. The beautifully typeset text is enhanced by illustrations by William Kent from the first edition of The Dunciad.

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From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Jacques Réda and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today’s rising stars mingling with the great writers of past centuries: La Fontaine, Villon, du Bellay, Christine de Pisan, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and many more. Here, too, are representatives of the modern francophone world, encompassing Lebanese, Tunisian, Senegalese and Belgian poets, including such notable writers as Léopold Senghor, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hédi Kaddour. Finally, this anthology showcases a wide range of the English language’s finest translators - including such renowned poet-translators as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Marianne Moore and Derek Mahon - in a dazzling tribute to the splendours of French poetry.

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For centuries poets in all the world's cultures have offered eloquent thanks and praise for the earth and its people. Both an emotion and a conscious practice, gratitude is a cherishing of what is over what has been or could be. It celebrates the joy in our lives while acknowledging the sorrows and losses that give that joy its keenness. The voices collected here range from Horace to Herrick, from Wordsworth and Keats, Yeats and Frost, to Czeslaw Milosz, Constantine Cavafy, Primo Levi, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Nikki Giovanni, and many many more. Devotional lyrics drawn from the major religious traditions offer their perspectives, alongside poetic tributes to autumn and the harvest season that draw our attention to nature's bounty and poignant beauty as winter approaches.

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When Heidi, a five-year-old orphan, is dumped on her reclusive grandfather who lives on a remote mountainside above a Swiss village, he is none too pleased by her arrival. But Heidi quickly wins him over with her cheerful disposition and kindness, and thoroughly enjoys her new life, spending the summer days roaming the Alpine pastures with young Peter the goatherd. Three years later, this rural idyll is cruelly interrupted when her aunt fetches Heidi away to the city as a hired companion for Clara, a rich girl who is disabled. Clara adores her new friend, but the family's strict housekeeper tries to repress Heidi's high spirits and she becomes ill, pining for her mountain home. The resolution of Heidi's dilemma transforms the lives of everyone around her and has entranced readers for generations with its vision of the joys of country life and the power of love and friendship.

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Many kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent war horses to cowboys' trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses. We encounter the famous Trojan horse in Virgil's Aeneid, only to see it from a quite different perspective in Matthea Harvey's whimsical 'Inside the Good Idea'. Longfellow shows us Paul Revere defying an empire from the back of a horse, while Shakespeare's Richard III vainly offers his kingdom for one. Robert Burns's 'Auld Farmer' dotes affectionately on his ageing mare, while Paul Muldoon's 'Glaucus' is devoured by his fierce young fillies. Robert Frost's little horse stopping by the woods is gently puzzled by human behaviour, while Ted Hughes is dazzled by a stunning vision of horses at dawn, 'grey silent fragments/Of a grey silent world'.Mythical and metaphorical horses cavort alongside vividly real ones in these poems, whether they be humble servants, noble companions, beloved friends or emblems of the wild beauty of the world beyond our grasp.

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In forms as various as the melodramas of old Scottish ballads and the hard-boiled poems of twentieth-century noir, here are assembled the most colourful villains and victims ever to be immortalized in verse, from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard to Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Mafia hit-men. Browning, Hardy, Auden, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Simon Armitage and Stevie Smith are only a few of the wide range of poets, old and new, whose comic, chilling and occasionally profound poetic musings on murder are gathered in this uniquely - and irresistibly - heart-racing volume.

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Ever since Pushkin, Russian poets have been famous for their ability to combine private and public experience in lyric poetry of a comprehensiveness and intensity unmatched elsewhere. Ranging in extremes from the melting tenderness of unrequited love to the bitter comedy of political chaos, this collection of poems covering two centuries includes work by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, Annensky,Mayakovsky, Bely, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky and others less celebrated but no less extraordinary. The text is divided into six sections. Russian poets constantly reflect on their art, so the first section is appropriately entitled 'The Muse'. Their other great topic is Russia herself, explored in parts two and three. Part four presents the inner world, parts five and six traditional themes of love and mortality. Poetry has often been a matter of life and death in Russia, where Mandelstam was not the only poet to perish in the Gulag. The comfortable private domain familiar to many English and American writers barely exists in a country where political realities are exigent - one reason for the fierce intensity found in so many of these poems.

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If you believe that a dog is man’s – and woman’s – best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind. Within these pages you will find a large selection of animals and an even larger variety of poets, some big and cuddly, others small and well-equipped with teeth. Dame Juliana Berners anatomizes a good greyhound, Lord Byron laments his best friend, Louis MacNeice describes an afternoon walk, William Wordsworth watches the hunt, Thomas Hardy imagines his favourite companion speaking. They are joined by Anne Sexton, Siegfried Sassoon, Alexander Pope, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Geoffrey Chaucer and a pack of others in hot pursuit of the same objective: the essence of dog.

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This anthology of comic verse is drawn from sources which range from the Greek Anthology to the present day. Divided into thematic sections (to be determined) for case of use, it covers a wide range of forms including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets and nonsense verse. The prevailing tone is light, but satire and ridicule - even passion - have not been excluded.

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Stories from the Kitchen is a mouth-watering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a rich variety of authors from Dickens, Chekhov and Saki to Isak Dinesen, Jim Crace and Amy Tan. The menu includes choice titbits from famous novels: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Proust's rhapsodic memories of watching the family cook prepare asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Zola's extravagant 'cheese symphony' scene from The Belly of Paris.Here are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell, Nora Ephron and T. C. Boyle; a short story by famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher; and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously said 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.'

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Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry, and this anthology offers a treasury of poems as varied and vital as the music that inspired them.From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Movement, from the poets of the New York School to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force. We hear it the poems of Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyaka, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty and C.D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and also poems that themselves throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

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The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in prose, and this volume includes all his short fiction, as well as unfinished sketches and fragments. Here of course are his masterpieces, 'The Queen of Spades', Pushkin's ironic take on both the supernatural and the society tale, the terse, deadpan Tales of Belkin, often humorous yet imbued with deep understanding of human nature, and his unsurpassable novella, The Captain's Daughter, which, informed by his meticulous research into the Pugachev Rebellion against Catherine the Great, is a perfect combination of folk epic, historical narrative and romance. Other works include the richly comic 'A History of the Village of Goriukhino', the imaginative historical fiction 'The Moor of Peter the Great' (based on the life of the author's own great-grandfather. Pushkin was particularly proud of his African ancestry), and 'Journey to Arzrum', the fascinating autobiographical account of his (unauthorized, and greatly displeasing to the Tsar) travels in the Caucasus at the time of the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war.

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Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark's capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that 'you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it'. He falls in with Copenhagen's Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature. Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark's landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of 'luck' to 'happiness' (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

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Written over two thousand years ago, The Art of War contains penetrating insights into the nature of power, inter-state rivalry, realpolitik and military success, relevant to any age. It was first translated into English in the early 20th century. Sun Tzu's short lines of argument and pithy aphorisms are highly accessible to modern readers, and his text has almost achieved cult status. He is quoted everywhere 'from divorce courts to Facebook', and has something to offer anyone interested in honing leadership skills and achieving in any competitive environment 'from the boardroom to the bedroom'. Sun Tzu's advice is shrewd and pragmatic - he does not glory in slaughter and prefers to win battles off the battlefield if possible; he is a strong supporter of the use of deception, of varying your shots and above all, of doing your research: knowing your enemy is key; but of little use if you do not also 'know yourself'.Features a brilliant new translation by Peter Harris. The iconic text in its original 13 short chapters printed unencumbered by notesThe text repeated, this time interspersed with selected extracts from the canon of traditional Chinese commentators who have explained Sun Tzu's wisdom over the centuries; each chapter ending with an explanatory note from Peter Harris

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This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will, which sets in motion a chain of events that brings dark truths to light. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres spins the most fundamental themes of truth, justice, love, and pride into a universally acclaimed masterpiece.

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Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.

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Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

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American Tabloid gives us John F. Kennedy's rise and fall from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end.The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders Klansmen and mafiosi, killers, hoods and provocateurs. WIth Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And of course a lot of corrupt policemen.Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.The American dream as Nightmare.

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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious single woman who rents the semi-ruinous Hall of the title. With a child but no husband, Helen divides the community between those who admire her charm and spirit and those who suspect her morals. Chief among her supporters is a local farmer, Gilbert Markham, who tells her story.Written before The Tenant, Agnes Grey, based on the author's own experience, explores the position of women in Victorian society through the story of a young woman forced to work as a governess when her father is ruined financially.

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Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars, is also home to the beautiful Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends, cutting them off from the world, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to explode, and Ka finds his sympathies drawn in unexpected and dramatic directions.

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p-Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent young children transform their nursery into a lethal trap. Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are stories which speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois, the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood - except for the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate geographies by Bradbury's astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are thrilling, terrifying stories such as 'The Fog Horn' - perfect for reading under the covers.Read for the first time, these stories are a feast for the imagination; read again - and again - they reveal new, dazzling facets of a master storyteller's extraordinary art.

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Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire itself

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Anthony, fifth Earl of Droitwich, is engaged to Violet, a millionaires daughter which was a result of their families planning rather than natures course. Their plan to maintain the family coffers is undermined by the arrival of his Nanny whom under the influence of too much medicinal Brandy allows certain skeletons out of the family tomb. On top of this Anthony has fallen for manicurist Polly Brown whom the family don't consider to be countess material. Tony departs for London with the resourceful Polly Brown, leaving the ancestral home in the hands of the Socialist barber Syd Price...

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First published in 1956, this collection of articles covers Wodehouse's feelings on United States, his adopted homeland all collected into one edition. Features a collection of articles originally from Punch magazine as well as America, I Like You, all with Wodehouse's usual wit and personality.

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An early Wodehouse novel, this is both a sporting story and a tale of friendship between two boys at boarding school. Mike (introduced in the novel Mike at Wrykyn) is a seriously good cricketer who forms an unlikely alliance with old Etonian Psmith (‘the P is silent’) after they both find themselves fish out of water at a new school, Sedleigh, where they eventually overcome the hostility of others and their own prejudices to become starsEven readers uninterested in cricket are likely to be gripped by descriptions of matches, and the plot, though slight, reaches a satisfying conclusion. But the real meat of the book is to be found in the characters, especially the elegant Psmith, one of Wodehouse’s immortal creations, who features in three of his later novels (Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Leave it to Psmith).

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Everyone in Company for Henry wants to escape from something. Hard-up Henry Paradene would like to unload his hideous country house on his millionaire American cousin, J. Wendell Stickney. Wendell wishes he could be rid of his embarrassing aunt Kelly, while Kelly wants to escape her financial dependence on Wendell. Henry's niece, Jane, needs to part from her glamorous but ghastly fiancé, Lionel, while Bill Hardy, who falls for Jane, needs no convincing to abandon the bachelor state. Jane's brother Algey, meanwhile, spends his time thinking up dodgy schemes to lift himself out of poverty. Everything ends happily ever after for most of them, but only when they have been put through the hoops of a classic Wodehouse plot.

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St Austin's school (as featured in The Pothunters) is the setting for twelve delightful early Wodehouse stories. The familiar ingredients - and some of the same characters - are present: cricket and rugby loom large, school colours are gained, tricks are played, exams avoided, revenge wreaked upon enemies, and the honour of School and House upheld. A nostalgic look at English public-school life at the turn of the twentieth century, made enjoyable today by the young Wodehouse's gentle humour and witty turn of phrase.

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It is the general view at Eckleton school that there never was such a house of slackers as Kay's. Fenn, head of house and county cricketer, does his best to impose some discipline but is continually undermined by his house-master, the meddlesome and ineffectual Mr Kay. After the Summer Concert fiasco, Mr Kay resolves to remove Fenn from office and puts his house into special measures, co-opting Kennedy, second prefect of Blackburn's, as reluctant troubleshooter with a brief to turn the place around. But without the backing of Fenn, and the whole house hostile towards him, how can he achieve the impossible ...?

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Much married American movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn depends on his friends at Bachelors Anonymous to keep him out of romantic entanglements on his trip to London. First, they arrange for Joe Pickering to be his bodyguard. Then his lawyer, Ephraim Trout, is sent to England to help fend off the actress Vera Dalrymple who is determined to ensnare Llewellyn. All seems to be going well. But when devoted bachelor Trout takes it upon himself to thwart a romance between Pickering and a beautiful journalist, he sets in train a series of events which end in more than one marriage including his own

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Three American sisters leave their chicken farm on Long Island for a holiday in Europe. In France they encounter the charming but penniless Marquis de Maufringneuse, his writer son Jeff, and the marquis’s tough American ex-wife. When they all find themselves together at the exclusive resort of St. Rocque - one of the sisters in search of a husband, the marquis in search of a fortune, the writer in search of love - Wodehousian complications ensue.

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The thought of being cooped up in Blandings Castle with Clarence, the Earl of Emsworth, the perennially youthful Galahad and with the Earl's younger son, Freddie Threepwood, openly appalled Colonel Wedge. It was, he grimly asserted, like being wrecked on a desert island with the Marx Brothers. But the arrival of Tipton Plimsoll at Blandings Castle considerably brightened the Colonel's horizon. For Tip-ton was a rich young American and rich young Americans were, in the Colonel's opinion, quite the most desirable companions for his daughter, Veronica, the dumbest beauty listed in the pages of Debrett. The stage was set for a great romance, or so the Colonel thought, and so it might have been had the knowledge of Freddie's erstwhile engagement to Veronica been withheld from the jealous Tipton, or if Prudence, the Earl's niece, had not been forcibly parted from her unsuitable lover, Bill Lister. On such incidents do great issues depend. However, Uncle Gaily, who combined the ready resource of a confidence trickster with the zeal of a cheerful crusader, intervened with an ingenious scheme to reunite the young lovers. It was a master-plan. How the plot miscarried at the crucial stage and in doing so caused a social and domestic revolution unparalleled in the history of Blandings Castle, is revealed in this most hilarious of chronicles.

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When George, Viscount Uffenham turns the entire family fortune into diamonds and squirrels them away, naturally he forgets where he has hidden the loot and finds himself compelled to let the family seat to stay afloat. So it is that Mrs Cork's health colony comes into being, providing the perfect setting for crime and young love to flower.

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While pursuing the love of his life, American heiress Pauline Stoker, Lord 'Chuffy' Chuffnell borrows the services of Jeeves, the perfect gentleman's gentleman. But when Chuffy finds out that Jeeves's employer, Bertie Wooster, was once engaged to Pauline himself – until the engagement was broken by her tough-egg father, abetted by loony-doctor Sir Roderick Glossop – such fearsome complications ensue that even Jeeves has difficulty securing a happy ending.

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Wodehouse is at his most sparkling in this collection of stories concering members of the Drones Club. Pongo Twistleton and Freddie Widgeon may be small of brain and short of cash but they are always good for ingenious adventures, especially when it comes to falling in love with the wrong girl or cooking up hopeless schemes to make money. They and their contemporaries populate a series of vignettes in which the plot-twists keep you on your toes while the jokes keep on coming.

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Who but P.G. Wodehouse could have extraced high comedy from the most noble and ancient game of golf? And who else could have combined this comedy with a real appreciation of the game, drawn from personal experience? Wodehouse's brilliant but humane brand of humour is perfectly suited to these stories of love, rivalry, revenge and fulfilment on the links. While the oldest member sits inside the clubhouse quoting Marcus Aurelius on patience and wisdom, outside on the green the strongest human passions burn. All human life is here, from Sandy McHoots, the cocky professional, to shy Ramsden Waters, whose only consolation in life is golf. Even golf-haters will not be able to resist stories which perfectly combine physical farce and verbal wit with a gallery of unforgettable characters.

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The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family. Growing up in the 1830s, they were all gifted children, especially Richard, whose natural talent for draughtsmanship was matched by imaginative invention and a passion for legend and the grotesque. In 1842, when only eighteen, he created for his own delight a picture-book version of Jack The Giant Killer, writing the text by hand, and carefully placing on each page a water-colour illustration within a pictorial border. The new everyman edition has typeset the text for greater legibility and redesigned the book for contemporary appeal, while retaining Doyle's vivid and characterful illustrations, enlarged and enhanced by modern colour printing techniques. The result is a book that will satisfy the modern child's appetite for bloodthirsty exploits of wonder and magic, yet is at the same time a true collector's item for anyone interested in the history of children's book illustration.

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There are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking Back

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When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have suspected that this journeyman task was to turn in to one of the great comic novels in English literature. After the premature death of the original illustrator, Dickens took charge of the project, which was published in monthly parts. The result is a brilliant panorama of English life in the 1830s, a cornucopia of stories and vignettes featuring dozens of vividly drawn characters. Chief among them are Mr Pickwick himself, a later day Don Quixote travelling about the country righting wrongs; and his Sancho Panza, Sam Weller, whose pithy sayings and bizarre anecdotes immediately became and remained part of national mythology. With The Pickwick Papers Dickens established himself at a single stroke as a major creative artist, revealing the depth of his human sympathies, the breadth of his interests and his extraordinary linguistic virtuosity. His first novel, published when he was 25, is his first masterpiece. The Everyman edition includes 43 illustrations by Seymour and 'Phiz' which accompanied the original edition and also reprints the 1907 preface by G. K. Chesterton.

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