Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Walter Scott

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

A Superb historical novel set in the late seventeenth century, Rob Roy is also an adventure story. Using his favourite device of contrasting characters and places, Scott sets romantic rural Scotland against the prosaic cities of Glasgow and London. In his tragic portrait of Rob Roy MacGregor, he shows the feudal world of the Highlands withering away under the onslaught of new commercial and political realities. With his own sympathies equally balanced, he is perfectly quipped to portray the struggle between them. Rob Roy has been made into a film, starring Liam Neeson, John Hurt, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth and Eric Stolpz.

Rob Roy

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

The Adolescent

Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim explores the dilemmas of conscience, of moral isolation, of loyalty and betrayal confronting a sensitive individual whose romantic quest for an honourable ideal are tested to the limit. In this novel, Conrad draws on his background as Polish emigré, as well as his first-hand experience as a seaman, to experiment radically with the presentation of human frailty and doubt in the modern world

Lord Jim

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Elves, changelings, leprechauns, pixies, brownies and sprites; England's Queen Mab, France's Melusine, Scandinavian nixies and Scottish selkies: these magical creatures are sometimes mischievous, sometimes dangerous, always enchanting. This collection brings together a diverse array of literary fairies: here are Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Titania, Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci, of course, but also Rimbaud's 'Fairy', Goethe's 'Erl-King', Denise Levertov's 'Elves', Sylvia Plath's 'Lorelei', Christopher Okigbo's 'Watermaid', Neil Gaiman's 'The Fairy Reel' and Patience Agbabi's changeling boy ('The Double').

Fairy Poems

Virginia Woolf

Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. But as time passes, bringing with it war and death, the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse

To The Lighthouse

Isabel Allende

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities - she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. 
Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa's fiancé, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen - has summoned - to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. 
We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls "the big house on the corner," which is soon populated with Clara's spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban's political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children: Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman, and the twins, Jaime and Nicolás, the former a solitary, taciturn boy who becomes a doctor to the poor and unfortunate; the latter a playboy, a dabbler in Eastern religions and mystical disciplines and, in the third generation, the child Alba, Blanca's daughter (the family does not recognize the real father for years, so great is Esteban's anger), a child who is fondled and indulged and instructed by them all. 
For all their good fortune, their natural (and supernatural) talents, and their powerful attachments to one another, the inhabitants of "the big house on the corner" are not immune to the larger forces of the world. And, as the twentieth century beats on, as Esteban becomes more strident in his opposition to Communism, as Jaime becomes the friend and confidant of the Socialist leader known as the Candidate, as Alba falls in love with a student radical, the Truebas become actors - and victims - in a tragic series of events that gives The House of the Spirits a deeper resonance and meaning.

The House Of The Spirits

Roald Dahl

Jeremy Treglown

Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and the unexpected in the tradition of Saki, and this volume does not disappoint. 
He began his literary career by writing about his own experiences in the RAF during World War II but soon developed this talent in a series of short-story collections. He is perhaps even more celebrated as an author of children's books, but the best of his short stories represent a claim for him to be numbered among the most remarkable story writers of the 20th century. 
The present volume includes for the first time all the stories in chronological order as established by Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, in consultation with the Dahl estate.

Roald Dahl Collected Stories

P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of people who aren’t who they say they are. Mix thoroughly and apply the Wodehouse magic. The result is the lightest of literary soufflées, another instalment in the long-running saga of the Threepwood family, including the head of the clan, Lord Emsworth, his virago sister, Lady Constance, and his debonair brother, the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, ex-boulevardier and solver of romantic problems.

Blandings Castle

George MacDonald Fraser

For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

Peter Carey

OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship. 
A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. 
 
 In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

Oscar and Lucinda

True History of the Kelly Gang

More stories about the incredible Mulliner clan, following on from Meet Mr Mulliner. This volume includes such classic Wodehouse tales as ‘The Man Who Gave Up Smoking’, ‘The Awful Gladness of the Mater’, ‘Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court’ and ‘The Passing of Ambrose’.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

V. S. Naipaul

Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

A Bend in the River

James Baldwin

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' 
 
Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Giovanni's Room

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter--the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

Erotic Stories

James Joyce

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'. 
 
Joyce expertly encapsulates the development of individual consciousness and the role of the artist in society in what is considered one of his greatest works.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Irène Némirovsky

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time. 
 
David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

Four Novels

The action is mostly set at Rudge Hall, home to the obese miser Lester Carmody, and at Healthward Ho, a health farm run by 'Chimp Twist, along with his cohorts 'Soapy' and 'Dolly' Molloy. who were all previously encountered in Sam The Sudden (1925) and would return in Money in the Bank (1946). 
Hugo Camody, Lester's nephew, and his friend Ronnie Fish, would appear later in Blandings Castle, home of Ronnie's uncle Lord Emsworth, in Summer Lightening (1929) and Heavy Weather (1933)

Money For Nothing

A. S. Byatt

When mild-mannered and unremarkable academic Roland Mitchell stumbles upon a letter written by Victorian poet Randolph Ash to a mysterious woman with whom he seems to be infatuated, he is determined to uncover the truth. 
 
Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession defies categorization. Rich in symmetry and symbolism, brimming over with myth, poetry and fairy tale, Byatt's masterpiece is part literary detective story, part academic satire and part historical novel. At its heart, however, is a compelling romance that draws the reader into the mirrored worlds of two couples, past and present, and explores the nature of obsession, possession and love.

Possession

When O'Hara and Moriarty, two boys at Wrykyn School, tar and feather the statue of a pompous local MP, O'Hara mislays at the scene of their crime a tiny gold bat borrowed from Trevor, captain of the school cricket team. The plot revolves around the fate of this bat and attempts to retrieve it, but the real focus of the novel is a vivid portrayal of school life. Though the setting is an English public school in the years before World War 1, so sharp is Wodehouse's ear for the way children talk that everyone will recognise familiar characters and situations, whatever their place of education.

The Gold Bat

Kazuo Ishiguro

As children, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy attended an exclusive boarding-school in the English countryside. Idyllic in some ways yet vaguely sinister, 'Hailsham' was a place of intense friendships, mysterious rules, and 'guardians' who constantly reminded the students how special they were. Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on their shared past and tells how she and her friends gradually came to understand the shocking reason for the careful nurturing they had received. An affecting meditation on friendship, love and mortality.

Never Let Me Go

Edgar Allan Poe

Probably the most important single figure in nineteenth century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exerted an enormous influence over later writers, especially French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire and Mallarme, and through them he affected the entire field of modern literature from THE WASTE LAND to LOLITA. Probably best known for his macabre short stories, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Poe's influence was spread primarily through his poems and essays which are here reprinted. The current volume includes all his extant poems and extensive selections from his essays on poetry.

Poe Poems and Prose

Patricia Highsmith

Three classic crime novels by a master of the macabre – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, and Ripley's Game – appear here together in hardcover for the first time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith’s hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing – not even murder – to accomplish his goals. In achieving the opulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself to be a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbingly sympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. Sent on a mission to Italy to coax an irresponsible young playboy back to his wealthy father in America, Ripley finds himself so fond of the young man that he sets out to be like him – exactly like him. The precarious charade that ensues is the first step to a life of elegance and ease – and perpetual danger. As she leads us through the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley’s deadly and sinister games, Highsmith turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into the mind of a man utterly indifferent to evil.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game

A collection of stories featuring familiar Wodehouse characters includes Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge and his fearsome Aunt Julia, Bingo Little and his wife, romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, twin Mulliner brothers George (the screenwriter) and Alfred (the conjuror),Galahad Threepwood, dotty Lord Emsworth and his younger son Freddie, the dog-biscuit salesman. In between stories, their creator explores some of the more extraordinary items in the American news of his day.

Plum Pie

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.

Killer Verse

Poems of Murder and Mayhem

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.

French Leave

A stalwart of the Angler's Rest, where he is usually to be found in company with Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, Mr Mulliner has an endless supply of brothers, nephews and cousins who feature in the tales with which he entertains the regulars in his favourite pub. There is George, the stammerer, who finds the courage to propose only after being chased by a mob; Wilfred, the chemist, who muddles his cosmetic potions with dire results; Lancelot, the film star; William, the lover of Myrtle Banks; Clarence, the society photographer; and Augustine, the curate, who saves his bishop from disgrace at the school reunion. All win through to love and success, but only after enough farcical mishaps to supply a dozen ordinary comic novelists.

Meet Mr Mulliner

Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction. 
 
Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family&rsquo;s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick. 
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father&rsquo;s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. 
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction). 
The Booker-shortlisted Mother&rsquo;s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother&rsquo;s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home. 
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

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 ...?

The Head Of Kay's

Willa Cather

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide the family to prosperity and safeguard the fortune of her brothers. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she succeeds against all odds, but only at the cost of her own fulfilment as a woman. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.

O Pioneers!

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.

Showing results for: ‘Neil MacGregor’

Filters

Category

Age

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter