Peter Dann
Madame Bovary (Version 2)
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting and shockingly frank novel, at once an acut…
The Odyssey (Version 4)
Homer's "The Odyssey" forms the template of practically every adventure story that has been told in the West since it was composed…
Heart of Darkness (version 4)
In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small…
The Iliad (Version 2)
This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here r…
Nostromo (Version 2)
In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a…
The Good Soldier (Version 2)
First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces,…
The Secret Agent (Version 3)
Taking as his inspiration the historical accidental death by explosion of an anarchist outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, Lond…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 1: The Bastille (Version 2)
Subtitled "The Bastille", Volume 1 of Thomas Carlyle's three volume "The French Revolution: A History" was first publish…
The End Of The Tether
At an age when he should, by rights, be embarking on a well-deserved and comfortable retirement, Captain Whalley, a sailor of the old school…
Lord Jim (version 2)
While it's not often described as such, "Lord Jim" can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which …
Some Do Not...
Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real h…
The Red and the Black
It is a brave author indeed who gives his hero as many flaws as Stendhal bestows upon young Julien Sorel, an ambitious young carpenter's son…
Don Quixote (Complete, Ormsby Translation)
It is a curious paradox that while the two volumes of Don Quixote have been described as the "best novel of all time" and the &quo…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 2: The Constitution (Version 2)
The second volume of this famous and idiosyncratic history covers events from October 1789, after Louis XVI has been 'persuaded' to leave Ve…
Almayer's Folly (Version 3)
Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father's Polish nationalist political a…
The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
In the 1870s, supporters of the pretender to the throne of Spain take advantage of a young man's attraction to the sea to persuade him to ru…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 3: The Guillotine
Of this third, and final, phase of the French Revolution, including that period known as The Terror, Carlyle comments "It is unfortunat…
Tales of Unrest (version 2)
A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is …
The Charterhouse of Parma
In an astounding act of literary improvisation, Stendhal dictated this complex and innovative novel, combining political and psychological r…
Moll Flanders - Version 2
This warm and witty novel presents itself as the first person narration of an immensely likeable and resourceful woman who, born in the most…