Poetry & Literature

Everyday life in the teeming metropolis during William Shakespeare's time in the city. Shakespeare's London was a bustling, teeming metropolis that was growing so rapidly that the government took repeated, and ineffectual, steps to curb its expansion...

Making a major part of England's literary heritage accessible to a new audience, Peter Ackroyd's The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling renders Geoffrey Chaucer's timeless tales in lucid, compelling modern English prose, with illustrations by Nick...

Dickens' spellbinding novel of love, obsession and the true meaning of inheritance, Great Expectations sees Pip make his way in the world haunted always by the figure of his unrequited adoration Estella and her embittered guardian Miss Havisham. In this...

Poems of London brings together a remarkably wide range of poems inspired by the storied city, from its teeming medieval streets to the multicultural metropolis it is today. The pantheon of classic English poets, from Shakespeare and Donne to Wordsworth...

The First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in modern history and produced horrors undreamed of by the young men who cheerfully volunteered for a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. Whether in the patriotic enthusiasm of Rupert...

The four great comedies of Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were all written at the height of the controversial Irish author's powers in his last, doomed decade, the 1890s...