Everyman's Library CLASSICS

The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen more. At the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson, who towers above them all. Yet this is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero's humbler friends in a picture which is, before all things, humane. This is a new, corrected, rest and reprinted edition. At 14. 99 for the complete edition of the Life in 1344 pages, it compares with Penguin's abridged edition of just 300 pages of text at 6. 99 and OUP's World Classics unabridged edition printed on newsprint at 10. 99.

In this classic of American literature, Thoreau gives an account of his two years’ experience of the ‘simple life’ in the woods, telling how he sought and found material and spiritual sustenance in the solitude of the cabin which he built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) made one reputation during his lifetime with his Utopian satire Erewhon, and a second reputation after his death with The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously. This novel, the story of Ernest Pontifex, is a thinly disguised autobiography in which Butler brutally but hilariously savages the financial, sexual, familial and spiritual hypocrisies of late Victorian England.

What connects Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? James Hogg. What connects gothic romance with Freud? James Hogg. What connects theology with psychopathology? James Hogg.
A gothic tale of good verses evil, about a pact with Satan and the horrific consequences. It's a chilling tale and cleverly written as the novel deals intelligently with the idea of pre-destination and in parts it treads the same path as the classic tale of Faust selling his soul to the Devil, in other places it shines a light on schizophrenia, a century before it was medically identified.

Prompted by his charismatic companion - who lacks only cloven hooves to give his identity away - our 'hero' is easily tempted into the belief that he can be God's champion by killing the already damned. Conveniently, as one of the elect, his lies, cruelty and murders cannot be held against him, since his salvation is already secured

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.

A leader of the twentieth-century Irish nationalist movement, who eventually became one of the Free States's senators, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is also the greatest poet that nation has yet produced. The present selection includes poetry from every period in life, dealing with all the topics closest to his heart: love, death, old age, ambition, the poet's craft, and of course the history and destiny of Ireland.