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Скачать книгу (размер 3 502 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 688) Аннотация: Quotations have exercised a particular fascination for humanity since the birth of recorded language and their potency in the age of the soundbite is stronger than ever. We revel in quotations, compete to know them, love them, hate them and inscribe them in books and on buildings, and this freshly revised and updated dictionary includes a wealth of new material among its 13,000 familiar, serious,…

Скачать книгу (размер 5 053 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 992) Аннотация: According to tradition Cervantes first conceived his comic masterpiece in jail — his avowed intent being to debunk the romances of chivalry. From first publication Don Quixote was a best-seller, initially taken as a knockabout account of a mad Spanish gentleman and his cowardly peasant squire, but later reinterpreted as an enlightenment text, a representation of universal human nature, a myth of…

Скачать книгу (размер 2 115 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 416) Аннотация: Drawing on the experience she gained while 'constantly employed by fashionable and noble families', Eliza Smith, writing a hundred years before Mrs Beeton, compiled a collection of more than 600 recipes which had met with 'the general approbation'. She was also at pains to pass on, for the benefit of every 'accomplished gentlewoman', a multitude of cures and remedies 'never before made publick'…

Скачать книгу (размер 3 665 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 720) Аннотация: »Human, All Too Human» (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner, forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power, the…

Скачать книгу (размер 1 952 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 384) Аннотация: Horrific, horrendous, unspeakable, The Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, stalked the streets of East London in 1888, slaughtering prostitutes and bewildering the police who were hunting him. They never succeeded in apprehending him, and to this day the mystery of his identity remains an enigma. But he did leave clues to his identity, and numerous theories have been entertained throughout the…

Скачать книгу (размер 4 726 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 928) Аннотация: The works of the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus represent one of the most important records of Judaism and the Jews that survive from the ancient world. The Jewish Antiquities, his largest historical enterprise, is an account in twenty books of Jewish history from the creation to the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66. Here is all the drama of the Old Testament transformed into a…

Скачать книгу (размер 728 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 144) Аннотация: Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling’s memoir of his writing life, was composed in the year before he died and published posthumously. Its spare, polished phrases and masterly anecdotes offer a unique insight into the mind of this divided man who upheld the Victorian imperialist values of duty, patriotism and obedience, and yet sympathized with outlaws and children. Kipling describes with…

Скачать книгу (размер 3 523 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 692) Аннотация: Modern views of Columbus are overshadowed by guilt about past conquests. Credit for discovering the New World, we are told, belongs to its original inhabitants rather than any European, and Columbus gave those inhabitants nothing apart from death, disease and destruction. Yet for the Old World of Europe the four voyages of Columbus brought revelation where before there had been only myths and…

Скачать книгу (размер 1 952 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 384) Аннотация: Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus, the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to…

Скачать книгу (размер 3 237 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 636) Аннотация: »London Labour and the London Poor» is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains…

Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: When Richard Hannay, the hero of «The Thirty-nine Steps», is recalled by the Head of British Intelligence from the Western Front at a critical moment in the battle for France, he has little idea that his contribution to the war effort will be much more crucial than the command of his Brigade in Flanders. In his strange odyssey to unravel the most sinister of conspiracies — to defeat the allies in…

Скачать книгу (размер 2 115 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 416) Аннотация: Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the…

Скачать книгу (размер 1 299 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 256) Аннотация: »The figure of my wife came in...it came straight towards the bed...its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable». Edith Nesbit, best known as the author of «The Railway Children» and other children's classics, was also the mistress of the ghost story and tales of terror. She was able to create genuinely chilling narratives in which the returning dead feature strongly. Sadly,…

Скачать книгу (размер 2 033 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 400) Аннотация: The ideas of Plato (c429-347BC) have influenced Western philosophers for over two thousand years. Such is his importance that the twentieth-century philosopher A.N. Whitehead described all subsequent developments within the subject as foot-notes to Plato's work. Beyond philosophy, he has exerted a major influence on the development of Western literature, politics and theology. The Republic deals…

Скачать книгу (размер 7 552 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1482) Аннотация: G. K. Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He went to St Paul's School and then on to the Slade School of Art. In 1900, he was asked to write a few magazine articles on art criticism, and from that beginning went on to become not only one of the most prolific writers of all time but, in the opinion of some, the best writer of the twentieth century. Chesterton, an absent-minded, overgrown elf of…

Скачать книгу (размер 5 216 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1024) Аннотация: The delicate artistry and lyrical prose of Woolf's novels have established her as a writer of sensitivity and profound talent. Virginia Woolf displays genuine humanity and concern for the experiences that enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party and her thoughts on that one day, and the interior monologues of others with interwoven lives reveal the…

Скачать книгу (размер 2 441 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 480) Аннотация: »Sentimental Education» has been described both as the first modern novel and as a novel to end all novels. Weaving a poignant love story into his account of the 1848 revolution, Flaubert shows a society in the grip of stereotypes, on every level. There is something farcical in his depiction of characters who aspire to act but are dogged by cliche at every turn. To a greater extent even than…

Скачать книгу (размер 3 584 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 704) Аннотация: As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, «Seven Pillars of Wisdom» is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. «Seven Pillars of Wisdom», written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East —…

Скачать книгу (размер 1 707 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 336) Аннотация: First published in 1909, «The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life» is a lively biography of England and arguably the world’s greatest playwright and poet by an ardent admirer. Pursuing the thesis that a man so elusive in the few surviving documents is found full blown in very one of his works, Frank Harris, a successful journalist and editor, turns his hand to creating an impressionistic portrait…

Скачать книгу (размер 2 115 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 416) Аннотация: Once more, the game's afoot as Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street returns in twenty new adventures specially commissioned for Wordsworth's Mystery & Supernatural series. The celebrated detective, along with his friend and biographer, Dr Watson, investigate a variety of baffling mysteries that will delight fans of the famous sleuth. Striding through the foggy gas lit streets of London, Holmes tackles…