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A dentist lies murdered at his Harley Street practice… The dentist was found with a blackened hole below his right temple. A pistol lay on the floor near his outflung right hand. Later, one of his patients was found dead from a lethal dose of local anaesthetic.A clear case of murder and suicide. But why would a dentist commit a crime in the middle of a busy day of appointments? A shoe buckle holds the key to the mystery. Now – in the words of the rhyme – can Poirot pick up th...

Time to bury the hatchet…In a dead man’s sister There are certain things that are best left unsaid. Though tragedy had touched the life of the wealthy Richard Abernethie, his sudden death seemed pretty unremarkable for a man of his age. So why would his sister wait until his funeral to say he had been murdered? When she is savagely killed with a hatchet the next day, her extraordinary remark suddenly takes on a chilling significance.In desperation, the family solicitor turns ...

Fully revised Second Edition. With a new Introduction and Bibliography by Dick Collins. The exploits of Sweeney Todd, ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’, have been recounted many times in plays, films and musicals, but the origins of the character largely were forgotten for many years. The String of Pearls - the original tale of Sweeney Todd, a classic of British horror - was first published as a weekly serial in 1846-7 by Edward Lloyd, the King of the Penny Dreadfuls. One of...

With an Introduction by Alex Dolby. Translation by W.H.G. Kingston.Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the world and provided means to escape from it. The collective enthusiasm of generations of readers of his 'extraordinary voyages' was a key factor in the rise of modern science fiction. In The Mysterious Island a group of men escape imprisonment during...

With an Introduction and Notes by Sara Haslam, Department of English, The Open University. The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe. They are 'playing the game', in style. That game has...

With an Introduction by A. M. de Medeiros, University of Kent at Canterbury. A year after the publication of The Three Musketeers,/em>, Alexandre Dumas produced a sequel worthy in every respect of the original. In Twenty Years After the much beloved D'Artaganan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis reunite to fight the forces of evil. In the original novel they defeated Milady, a formidable foe; now they need to face her vengeful son Mordaunt, as well as countering the machinations of t...

This beautifully engineered glimpse into the world and works of Leonardo da Vinci is a spectacular 3-D celebration of one of the world’s most creative minds. Presented as if it were the master’s previously undiscovered private journal, it recreates his original notes, drawings and astonishing inventions.

With an introduction by Dr. Laurence Marlow. A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw cap...

With an Introduction and Notes by Scott Brewster, University of Central Lancashire. Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and The Woman in White is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in north London, encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast, from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie...

Chosen by Emma Watson for her feminist book club 'Our Shared Shelf''Women Who Run With The Wolves is a gift of profound insight, wisdom and love. An oracle from one who knows' Alice WalkerIn the classic Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells us about the 'wild woman', the wise and ageless presence in the female psyche that gives women their creativity, energy and power. For centuries, the 'wild woman' has been repressed by a male-orientated value system w...

Concluding the story of The Hobbit, this is the final part of Tolkien’s epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, featuring a striking black cover based on Tolkien’s own design, the definitive text, and a detailed map of Middle-earth.The armies of the Dark Lord Sauron are massing as his evil shadow spreads even wider. Men, Dwarves, Elves and Ents unite forces to do battle against the Dark. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam struggle further into Mordor, guided by the treacherous creatur...

Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury. With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition...

Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury. Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’. This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales from the period in ...

Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. With an Introduction by Ray Furness. The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche's last lucid months, show him at his most stimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Übermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate, forcing the reader to face unpalatable insights and to rethink every commonly accepted 'truth'. Thinking wit...

Illustrated by John D. Batten. Stories selected by Jennifer Chandler, The Folklore Society. The captivating Irish stories collected in this new edition include both comic tales such as Paddy O'Kelly and the Weasel, and tales of heroes from ancient literature such as How Cormac Mac Art went to Faery. By turns funny, fantastical and mysterious, the stories are matched in liveliness by the original illustrations of John D. Batten. It would be hard to find a better introduction f...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Henry V as its inaugral volume, presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Henry V is the most famous and influential of Shakespeare's history plays. Its powerful patriotic r...

The popular paperback edition of this fascinating collection of stories, which continue the tales of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and contains an alternative version of The Children of Hurin. Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and provides those who have read The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories from the twentieth century's mo...

With an Introduction by Jeff Wallace. 'A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die...'. Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task. Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological...

The Prophet represents the acme of Kahlil Gibran's achievement. Writing in English, Gibran adopted the tone and cadence of King James I's Bible, fusing his personalised Christian philosophy with a spirit and oriental wisdom that derives from the richly mixed influences of his native Lebanon. His language has a breath-taking beauty. Before returning to his birthplace, Almustafa, the 'prophet', is asked for guidance by the people of Orphalese. His words, redolent with love and ...

With an Introduction by Jane O'Grady. Translated by Tom Griffith.In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party and talk about love, until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and decides to discuss Socrates instead. Symposium gives an unsurpassed picture of the sparkling society that was Athens at the height of her empire. The setting of the other dialogues is more sombre. Socrates is put on trial for impiety, and sentenced to death. Euthyphro discusses the nature ...

This definitive paperback edition features nine illustrations and two maps drawn by J.R.R. Tolkien, and a preface by Christopher Tolkien. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely travelling further than the pantry of his hobbit-hole in Bag End.But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of thirteen dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an unexpected journey ‘there and back again’. They have...

With an Introduction by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading.Translated by C.J. Hogarth.Fathers and Sons is one of the greatest nineteenth century Russian novels, and has long been acclaimed as Turgenev's finest work. It is a political novel set in a domestic context, with a universal theme, the generational divide between fathers and sons. Set in 1859 at the moment when the Russian autocratic state began to move hesitantly towards social and political reform, the novel explor...

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. A Pair of Blue Eyes, though early in the sequence of Hardy's novels, is lively and gripping. Its dramatic cliff-hanging episode, for example, is at once tense, ironic, feministic and erotic. With settings in Wessex and London, the novel also has some strongly autobiographical features, as the blue-eyed heroine, Elfride Swancourt, is based largely on Emma Gifford, who became Thomas Ha...