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"Jonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet is at once a denunciation of the mistreatment of Ireland's poor and a daringly inventive comic rhapsody. Still shocking in its defiance of good taste and unrivalled in its evisceration of political hypocrisy, this is one of the greatest satires ever written."--from publisher.
2) On being ill
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A literary conversation about illness and care giving between patient and nurse, mother and daughter.
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"I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain."
In this intriguing literary fragment-published seventeen years after Bram Stoker's most famous novel-an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on
Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But...
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Is it better to reign in hell than to serve in Heaven?
Wells at his thoughtful best, "The Country of the Blind" (1904) is one of his best-known and most-anthologized short stories.
The fable tells the story of a stranded mountaineer's fateful discovery of a mythical village where everyone is blind only to realise that he can teach and rule them. But much to his dismay the villagers do not show any understanding of this fifth sense that is entirely...
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Serpents and reptiles reach the heights of mountains and rocks, while the most fiery of steeds can never climb there.
Baron d'Holbach's 1776 Essay on the Art of Crawling is a delicious satire on the sycophancy and self-abasement rife in the courts of Europe. A penetrating account of the workings of power that applies as much to today's courtiers as it did to those of the eighteenth century, it also makes a compelling case for the value of moral independence...
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More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.
In this brilliant essay the historian Tony Judt describes the singular contribution made by railways to the development of our shared way of life. From the transformation of urban spaces to the reorganisation of our sense of time, it is impossible to imagine the world we live in without the social and economic changes wrought by rail travel: no other mode...
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The world's humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization.
Stephen Leacock writes a masterful account of how humour works-and of how it very often doesn't. As well as being remarkably insightful about the various ways in which a joke can fall flat, Humour as I See It is an exceptionally humane testimony from one of the English language's most gifted humourists.
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We are going to Rome to scatter these words of liberty far and wide, words which for seven years have been forbidden like a crime. And with reason, for if they had been allowed, they would have shaken the fascist tyranny to its foundations within a few hours.
In 1931 the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis flew over Rome in a small plane in order to scatter anti-Fascist pamphlets from the sky. He did not survive the journey, but in “Story of My Death”...
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I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.
Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In “Unpacking My Library” he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as...
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No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost.
A great American novelist offers a scathing attack on the worst kinds of reading. Edith Wharton argues that the growing cultural influence of "mechanical" readers is having a disastrous impact on the world of letters. A subtly devastating work of social criticism, “The Vice of Reading” is also a celebration of the voracious...
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I invent the most hopeless sounding plots; very often they are based on something I've read in a newspaper. And people say, 'Oh, this is all nonsense', and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols.
Between them, Ian Fleming and Georges Simenon created two of the best-known heroes of modern fiction. In this illuminating dialogue, the authors who gave us James Bond and Jules Maigret discuss (among other...
12) The 1854 Oration
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"It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many".
A powerful lament for an imperilled way of life, the 1854 speech traditionally attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe is a vital document in the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Chief Seattle's oration was delivered in the face of the impending loss of his people's land to the State of Washington, and it remains a profound meditation on...
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"It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you".
James Baldwin was one of America's most powerful analysts of the psychology of white supremacy. In this speech, delivered in 1965 at the Cambridge Union Society, he offers a devastating, but also strikingly empathetic, account of the role played by racism...
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"I know the same day made me free, which was the last day for him who made the proverb true-One must be born either a Pharaoh or a fool".Best known as a philosopher and tragedian, in Apocolocyntosis Seneca also produced one of classical literature's greatest satires. Depicting a posthumous trial in which the recently deceased Emperor Claudius makes the case for his elevation to the company of the gods, this short work brilliantly skewers the pretensions...
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"I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face."
An ostensibly whimsical story about the adventures of a Berlin art dealer, Stefan Zweig's The Invisible Collection is a powerful evocation of the condition of Germany between the wars. When Zweig's anonymous narrator sets off to the provinces in search of a lucrative bargain, he finds himself...
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"The drunkard who comes out with an absurd order, the dreamer who suddenly wakes and with his bare hands strangles the woman sleeping beside him – are they perhaps not carrying out one of the Company's secret decisions? These silent workings, so like those of God, give rise to all manner of speculation."
The affairs of Babylon are dictated by a lottery. Discreetly administered by a mysterious and seemingly omnipotent Company, the lottery can elevate...
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"Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer."
In The Case Against Travel the philosopher Agnes Callard launches a vigorous assault on the idea that there is something transformative or ennobling about recreational travel. Going well beyond commonplace complaints about...
18) The Fly
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"Now one could imagine that the little front legs rubbed against each other lightly, joyfully. The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; it was ready for life again."
Deft, subtle, and bitingly ironic, Katherine Mansfield's short story is a highly concentrated depiction of grief and cruelty. Taking as its narrative occasion a brief meeting between two bereaved fathers, The Fly remains an outstanding literary portrayal of the shadow cast by the...
19) Helen's Exile
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"The Greeks never said that the limit could not be overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can contradict them."
Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus's essay is a searching inquiry into the origins of the hubris and fanaticism that laid waste to twentieth-century Europe. At once a celebration of the classical virtues of balance and serenity...
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"A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb."
In 1938 Mahatma Gandhi wrote a bracing and, at times, discomfiting essay on the claims of justice and nationhood in Palestine. Profoundly informed by its author's sympathy for the plights of Jews and Arabs alike, this text is also uncompromising in its advocacy of the path of non-violence-even in the most challenging of circumstances. Justice in Palestine is an essential...
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