Humanities and Arts Books

"Love, its flutes will still be stringing, Lovers still will sigh and kneel; Freedom sets her trumpets ringing To the clash of smiting steel." So I weave of love and glory, Homely toil, and martial show, Fair romance from the grand story Lived a century ago.

As the book opens, Fauchery, a drama critic, is waiting for the hottest play in Paris to open. "The Blonde Venus" has bad music and bad actresses, but a new star, Nana, who appears on stage clad only in a diaphanous wrap brings down the house anyway. Nana is an experienced concubine. She exploits...

The narrator, Charles Darnaway, a recent graduate of Edinburgh University, travels to the remote island of Aros off the north-west coast of Scotland. Aros is the home of his uncle, Gordon Darnaway, a hard-hearted and alcoholic Presbyterian. Charles has come in search of sunken treasure, as he...

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894) - Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist, best known for his adventure stories. Stevenson was a sickly man (he died of tuberculosis) who nevertheless led an adventurous life. He spent his last five years on the island of Samoa as a planter and chief of the...

A young man who, of all things, is sent to rural Normandy near Bayeux to recover his health fits into the aristocratic scene easily. He is the Baron Gaston de Nueil, and he has good teeth and some prospects in life. While in Normandy, he hears that the notorious Madame de Beauseant, who has...

The Odyssey (Ancient Greek: Ὀδύσσεια, Odysseia) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the...

The Iliad (sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the...

In The Straw, O’Neil treats himself much as he treated the friends of his sailor days, with a certain objectivity that sought no genuine revelation. The name he gave to his fictional self was Stephen Murray* of whom some years later he said, “I confess I believe there is a great deal of the...

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant-Ivory produced an...

Chesterton declares that it is fashionable to boast that one cannot understand Browning but he reveals in this fascinating literary biography how Browning 'combines the greatest brain with the simplest temperament'. This is a multi-faceted biography and critique of Browning's work. Chesterton...