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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Georges Bataille

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Bataille&rsquo;s first novel, published under the pseudonym &lsquo;Lord Auch&rsquo;, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille&rsquo;s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Story of the Eye

John Galsworthy

In this second part of John Galworthy's trilogy of love, power, money and family feuding, a new generation has arrived to divide the Forsyte clan with society scandals and conflicting passions.

The Forsyte Saga

Volume 2

In this final volume of The Forsyte Saga Galsworthy writes about the lives and loves of the Cherrell family, cousins of the Forsytes. For centuries, the Cherrell sons have left their home of Condaford Grange to serve the state as soldiers, clergymen and administrators, but the 1930s bring uncertainty in a world of rapidly altering morals and unemployment. Galsworthy&rsquo;s portrayal of the effect of political change on individuals show him as a great social novelist as well as the author of one of the most gripping family sagas ever written.

Volume 3

The Forsyte Saga is the first part of John Galsworthy&rsquo;s magnificent, well-loved Forsyte Chronicles, which trace the changing fortunes of the wealthy Forsyte dynasty through fifty years of material triumph and emotional disaster. The Forsyte Saga begins as the nineteenth century is drawing to a close, and the upper middle classes, with their property and propriety, are becoming a dying section of society. The Forsytes are blind to this fact, clinging to their conventions and &lsquo;brilliant respectability&rsquo;. As dignified Soames Forsyte struggles to uphold the old moral code in the face of the social revolution resulting from the Great War, his wife Irene&rsquo;s extraordinary beauty causes even more disruption. The bitter feud between them comes to split the Forsyte family for two generations.

Volume 1

Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: 'a history of the world ... and in the process, my own'.  Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.

Moon Tiger

Joanne Greenberg

Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple &lsquo;Outside&rsquo; &ndash; in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a car kickstarts years of debt, hard labour and ostracization; but they find solace and expression in the richness of Sign, in their hard-won independence and in the birth of their daughter Margaret. 
 
First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL&rsquo;s formal recognition as a language, In This Sign is a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community and a moving family saga that spans the twentieth century. 
 
With an introduction by Sara Novic and a new afterword by the author.

In This Sign

Maryse Condé

The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing. The people of Segu, the Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests while their lives are ruled by nature. But change is about to come: from the east comes a new religion, Islam, and from the West, the slave trade. Segu follows the life of Dousika Traore, the king's most trusted advisor, and his four sons: Tiekoro, who embraces Islam; Siga, a merchant; Naba, who is kidnapped by slave traders; and Malobali, a mercenary and half-hearted Christian. Based on historical events, Segu captures the struggle of a growing nation trying to cope with jihads, national rivalries and racism.

Segu

Penguin Modern Classics

Gabriel García Márquez

An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

L. P. Hartley

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

The Go-between

Russell Hoban

Serial philanderer Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girlfriend Serafina leaves him. In a desperate state at Piccadilly Circus underground station, he meets wealthy, mysterious Mr Rinyo-Clacton, and ends up agreeing to a Faustian pact: Mr Rinyo-Clacton will give Jonathan one million pounds, if he agrees to die in a year's time. Can Jonathan go on living like this? Can he go on living at all? A wry, affectionate look at what goes on between consenting, relenting and dissenting adults.

Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

Henry Miller

The last volume of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Nexus continues the story of Henry Miller's escapades and quest for freedom. Feeling trapped in Brooklyn and his marriage with the volatile Mona, he becomes more interested in her extravagant friend, Stasia. After a complicated ménage à trois with Mona and Stasia, he is abandoned by both women and decides to sail for Paris to begin his resurrection as a writer. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

Nexus

Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally - after fifty-one years, nine months and four days - Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?

Love in the Time of Cholera

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface of civilization, this is a novel torn between identifying with history's victims and being seduced by the monstrous glamour of its terrible victors, and is one of the twentieth century's great nihilist works.

Blue of Noon

Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

Atlas Shrugged

The first novel in the autobiographical Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Sexus depicts Miller's first stormy marriage and his sexual escapades in New York City with the mysterious dance hall hostess Mona. Published in 1949 in Paris, this picaresque tale was banned in the US and the UK for two decades. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

Sexus

Clarice Lispector

A lonely woman in Rio de Janeiro makes a connection that will change her life. Ulisses, a mysterious man, has penetrated her soul and turned her inside out. 
 
This is a devastating novel of the interior, of a woman yearning to love, of the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, of the cosmic changes that enrich us and destroy us at the dawn of love.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

The second volume of The Rosy Crucifixion, Plexus is the core of the trilogy, the audacious story of a man looking for freedom and the true life of the spirit. It finds the young Henry Miller in the midst of his second tumultuous marriage with the dance hall hostess Mona, as he is constantly challenged by her volatile personality, and takes readers back to his childhood in early 20th-century Brooklyn as well as his first attempts at becoming a writer. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

Plexus

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin 
 
Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality. 
 
'At last an unprintable book that is fit to read' Ezra Pound 
 
'A momentous event in the history of modern writing' Samuel Beckett 
 
'The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written' Erica Jong

Tropic of Cancer

In these three works of erotic prose Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille's death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire. This volume also contains Bataille's own introductions to his texts as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings.

Showing results for: ‘Neil MacGregor’

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