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

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Mark Twain

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.

Twain's playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with his real-life adventures, some of them so outrageous they cannot be true - or can they? 
 
As Richard Russo says in his fascinating introduction, Twain was an 'inspired, indeed, unparalleled, bullshitter' who himself cheerfully relates how as a cub reporter out West he had elevated a routine Indian attack on a wagon full of immigrants to a battle that 'to this day has no parallel in history' - once he knew he could get away with it. 
 
There is drama as well as comedy in his account of life on the Mississippi, and great sadness too when his younger brother Henry is killed in a steamboat explosion - all the more poignant for the restraint with which he describes it. In The Innocents Abroad Twain the gleeful iconoclast is a passenger on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land, poking fun at European snobbery and pretension and refusing to be overawed by all that History - but fully prepared to aim his satirical barbs at his fellow-tourists and indeed, squarely at himself. 
 
He also proves to be a deeply compassionate writer, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skilful in mining the humour of human folly. He brought to literature a new, distinctly American voice - and he harboured as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody and define.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 2

Selections from the Memoirs and Travel Writings

H G Wells

In The Time Machine an inventor travels to the remote future where he finds both love and terror. The protagonist of The Invisible Man struggles to come to terms with his condition in a narrative which is by turns comic and tragic. The War of the Worlds imagines planetary conflict from an individual point of view. If these themes reveal the originality of Wells as a thinker, each story displays his skill as a novelist by the ways in which he anchors astonishing events in vivid everyday details of character and place.All three have spawned countless adaptations and imitations but Wells remains the greatest poet of science we have, an inexhaustible source for speculation about the nature of the future and the meaning of the present.

The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds

Oscar Wilde

Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde's belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works include Wilde's once-controversial and now classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the riotously comic plays &quot;The Importance of Being Earnest&quot; and &quot;Lady Windermere's Fan,&quot; and the famous poem he wrote after being released from prison, &quot;The Ballad of Reading Gaol.&quot; This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of Wilde's moving letter from prison, De Profundis, and his teasing parable about Shakespeare, &quot;The Portrait of Mr. W. H.&quot; Other notable included writings are the semi-comic mystery story &quot;Lord Arthur's Savile's Crime&quot; and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Plays, Prose Writings And Poems

First assembled on paper in the fourteenth century, the eleven stories in The Mabinogion reach far back into the oral traditions of Welsh poetry. Closely linked to the Arthurian legends – King Arthur himself appears in one of the stories – they summon up a world of mystery and magic which is still evoked by the landscape so vividly described in them. 
 
Mingling fantasy with tales of chivalry, they prefigure the great romances of the Middle Ages but stand on their own merits as magnificent evocations of a golden age of Celtic civilization.

The Mabinogion

Alexander von Humboldt

Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing volcanoes in the Andes, swimming with crocodiles, racing through anthrax-infected Siberia, or publishing groundbreaking bestsellers. Ahead of his time, he recognized nature as an interdependent whole and he saw before anyone else that humankind was on a path to destroy it. He was one of the first European to study the Inca, Aztec and Mayan cultures and his epic five-year expedition to Latin America (1799–1804) prompted him to denounce slavery as 'the greatest evil ever to have afflicted humanity'. To Humboldt, the melody of his prose was as important as its content, and this selection from his most famous works - the Personal Narrative of his travels to Latin America, Cosmos, Views of Nature, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, The Geography of Plants and his anti-slavery essay in Political Essay of the Island of Cuba - allows us the pleasure of reading his own accounts of his daring explorations and new concept of nature. Humboldt’s writings profoundly influenced naturalists and poets including Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Whitman. The Selected Writings is not only a tribute to Humboldt’s important role in environmental history and science, but also to his ability to fashion powerfully poetic narratives out of scientific observations.

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