Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, this book follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship.

Discover an original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages. Imagine you could travel back to the fourteenth century.

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu - the twentieth century's greatest killer – and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid-19 pandemic. 'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story...

'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' Kate MosseThis volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century.

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic. From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects.

Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party's aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he'll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. Darkness at Noon is as gripping as...

Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Virginia Woolf learned of him from the love letters Elizabeth wrote to her future husband, fellow poet Robert Browning, and found ‘the figure of their dog made me laugh so, I couldn't resist making him a Life.’ The resulting ‘biography’ combines sensuous imaginative description with sharp social comment, and brings Woolf’s unsentimental humour and insight to the fore. We see F...

Bigger Thomas has grown up in Chicago’s slums, reckless, angry and adrift. A respectable job with the affluent Dalton family provides hope but sets him on course for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre in an ever-narrowing endgame.

First published in 1940, Native Son shocked readers with its candid depiction of violence and confrontation of racial stereotypes. ...

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs...