This book is selected & introduced by David Stuart Davies. Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 — 1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spirits beyond the grave and other supernatural phenomena. While claiming not to believe in ghosts, paradoxically she did confess that she was frightened of them. Wharton imbues this potent irrational and imaginative fear into her ghostly fiction to great effect. In this unique collection of finely wrought tales Wharton demonstrates her mastery of the ghost story genre. Amongst the many supernatural treats within these pages you will encounter a married farmer bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell which saves a woman's reputation; the weird spectral eyes which terrorise the midnight hours of an elderly aesthete; the haunted man who receives letters from his dead wife; and the frightening power of a doppelganger which foreshadows a terrible tragedy. Compelling, rich and strange, the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, like vintage wine, have matured and grown more potent with the passing years.

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This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting new selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings. Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands — Fisher's Ghost by John Lang is set in Australia and A Ghostly Manifestation by 'A Clergyman' is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930. It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

«Who was Nostradamus, and what faith should we place in his predictions? This book gives objective answers. It reveals that Michel de Nostredame, a 16th-century French doctor, was more Renaissance man than arcane magician — and that his prognostications can be compellingly astute. In this edition all of the cryptic short verses of Nostradamus's «Centuries» appear in the original French, with new translations. Uncanny prophecies such as those of the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler are examined in detail. Here too are interpretations of the many verses believed to augur future events. Editor Ned Halley works in fields of journalism as diverse as medicine, wine and business. He takes a Plain English approach to 'a subject far too often wreathed in language that seems calculated to obscure, rather than to demonstrate, the truth'.»

«Crime Scenes» is a sparkling collection of short stories written by modern masters and mistresses of the crime fiction genre. Within these pages you will find tales of murder, mystery and mayhem in a great variety of styles and tones from the time-honoured whodunnit to the psychological chiller to the history mystery to the crime procedural to the noir thriller to the gangster epic and the darkly humorous narrative. This volume demonstrates clearly how the crime story has developed and matured over the last two hundred years or so into the exciting, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining form of fiction it is today. The impressive cast of contributors includes well-respected and well-established names such as Peter Lovesey, Edward Marston, Natasha Cooper, Judith Cutler and Russell James as well as those currently making their reputation as fine exponents of their craft and a few young lions whose work is bristling with promise. Crime Scenes is a treasure chest of delights for the fans of crime fiction.»

What is a slack-ma-girdle? Or a submarino? How did White Horse whisky get its name? Or Old Bawdy barley wine? How do you make a really dry martini? Or beer? Or champagne? The answers to these enquiries and thousands of others are revealed in this unique guide to every kind of alcohol, compiled by dedicated drinker and collector of little histories, Ned Halley, who is an award-winning writer on beer, a nationally syndicated wine columnist and author of numerous books on drink. In a straightforward A to Z format, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Drink identifies thousands of individual brewers, distillers and winemakers, as well as the names of their products. The dictionary aims to be of real, practical help in locating beers and ciders, wines and spirits of every hue to their maker and place of origin. Here, too, are descriptive terms used on labels, along with the less-formal words used by producers and purveyors to promote their products in the market place. Origins, from village breweries to entire wine-producing regions, are located by nation, province and district. In many cases, there is a mention of when a producer or product was established, perhaps a word about the founder or a brief explanation of a curious-sounding brand name. The book is laced with historical anecdotes, a thousand cocktail recipes, essys on topics from the Guiness dynasty to the principles of brewing, from the discovery of distilling to the history of exise duty — and illustrated with hundreds of drink labels from all around the world.

According to tradition Cervantes first conceived his comic masterpiece in jail — his avowed intent being to debunk the romances of chivalry. From first publication Don Quixote was a best-seller, initially taken as a knockabout account of a mad Spanish gentleman and his cowardly peasant squire, but later reinterpreted as an enlightenment text, a representation of universal human nature, a myth of a tragic hero defending man's nobler aspirations, a study in alienation, a spiritual autobiography, a metaphor for Spain's imperial decline, an experimental novel that shaped later prose fiction, a tragedy and comedy in one, and a demonstration that ambiguity and uncertainty can lie at the centre of great art and that great art can be comic. Smollet's vigorous and lively translation brilliantly catches the feeling and tone of the Spanish original. It is a comic novelist's homage to a comic novelist.

«Human, All Too Human» (1878) marks the point where Nietzsche abandons German romanticism for the French Enlightenment. At a moment of crisis in his life (no longer a friend of Richard Wagner, forced to leave academic life through ill health), he sets out his views in a scintillating and bewildering series of aphorisms which contain the seeds of his later philosophy (e.g. the will to power, the need to transcend conventional Christian morality). The result is one of the cornerstones of his life's work. It well deserves its subtitle 'A Book for Free Spirits', and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here finds a new champion. «Beyond Good and Evil» (1886) is a scathing and powerful critique of philosophy, religion and science. Here Nietzsche presents us with problems and challenges that are as troubling as they are inspiring, while at the same time outlining the virtues, ideas, and practices which will characterise the philosophy of the future. Relentless, energetic, tirelessly probing, he both determines that philosophy's agenda and is himself the embodiment of the type of thought he wants to foster.»

Horrific, horrendous, unspeakable, The Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, stalked the streets of East London in 1888, slaughtering prostitutes and bewildering the police who were hunting him. They never succeeded in apprehending him, and to this day the mystery of his identity remains an enigma. But he did leave clues to his identity, and numerous theories have been entertained throughout the one hundred and twenty years since he held London’s East End in his grip of terror. This book looks at the evidence left by the murderer and the reports and investigative papers which recorded the atrocities that the ripper performed. It takes time to analyse the existing information and evaluate the letters sent to the police. It is the strongest and most powerful book ever written on the murders. It dispels a lot of myths attached to the Ripper, and eliminates a lot of the previously conjectured perpetrators, leaving only those who realistically could have been… Jack the Ripper.

The works of the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus represent one of the most important records of Judaism and the Jews that survive from the ancient world. The Jewish Antiquities, his largest historical enterprise, is an account in twenty books of Jewish history from the creation to the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66. Here is all the drama of the Old Testament transformed into a historical narrative of Greco-Roman character; and more important, our only continuous account of Middle Eastern affairs in the two hundred years that led up to the revolt. William Whiston, successor to Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, published his famous translation of Josephus' works in 1737. The modern system of chapter divisions has been added.

Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling’s memoir of his writing life, was composed in the year before he died and published posthumously. Its spare, polished phrases and masterly anecdotes offer a unique insight into the mind of this divided man who upheld the Victorian imperialist values of duty, patriotism and obedience, and yet sympathized with outlaws and children. Kipling describes with unforgettable vividness his bitter childhood years in the ‘House of Desolation’, his apprenticeship to the craft of writing through the hard grind of journalism in British India, his beloved parents and his pride in his own work. Reissued with a new introduction by Jan Montefiore, author of the brilliant recent study ‘Rudyard Kipling’, this memoir is indispensable reading not only for Kipling admirers, but for anyone who cares about the art and craft of writing.

Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus, the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to bedchamber — their intrigues, their loves and their deaths. Himself a court official, he quotes from a variety of sources, from the official and private documents as well as from old anecdotes, gossip, songs and jokes, giving an unparalleled oblique view of his subjects. Long familiar to students of classics, he found a new audience as the main source for Robert Graves' novels and the subsequent television series I, Claudius.

«London Labour and the London Poor» is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. To pass from one to the other, writes one authority, is to cross sides of the same street.»

The ideas of Plato (c429-347BC) have influenced Western philosophers for over two thousand years. Such is his importance that the twentieth-century philosopher A.N. Whitehead described all subsequent developments within the subject as foot-notes to Plato's work. Beyond philosophy, he has exerted a major influence on the development of Western literature, politics and theology. The Republic deals with the great range of Plato's thought, but is particularly concerned with what makes a well-balanced society and individual. It combines argument and myth to advocate a life organized by reason rather than dominated by desires and appetites. Regarded by some as the foundation document of totalitarianism, by others as a call to develop the full potential of humanity, the Republic remains a challenging and intensely exciting work.

«Sentimental Education» has been described both as the first modern novel and as a novel to end all novels. Weaving a poignant love story into his account of the 1848 revolution, Flaubert shows a society in the grip of stereotypes, on every level. There is something farcical in his depiction of characters who aspire to act but are dogged by cliche at every turn. To a greater extent even than «Madame Bovary», «Sentimental Education» is an indictment of modern consumerism, contrasting the hollowness of material achievement with the lasting beauty of the ideal. Flaubert's study of success and failure offers us a terrible sadness in a terrible beauty, yet is one of the world's great comic masterpieces.»

«As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, «Seven Pillars of Wisdom» is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. «Seven Pillars of Wisdom», written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East — one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus. «Seven Pillars of Wisdom» is no 'Boys Own Paper' tale of Imperial triumph, but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, and alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce.»

Once more, the game's afoot as Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street returns in twenty new adventures specially commissioned for Wordsworth's Mystery & Supernatural series. The celebrated detective, along with his friend and biographer, Dr Watson, investigate a variety of baffling mysteries that will delight fans of the famous sleuth. Striding through the foggy gas lit streets of London, Holmes tackles such cases as the puzzle of the Green Skull, the secret of the Brown Box, the conundrum of the Dragon of Lea Lane, as well as coming face to face once again with the Sussex Vampire. We also learn what really happened at the Reichenbach Falls when Holmes had his fateful encounter with Professor Moriarty. David Stuart Davies, Denis O. Smith, Mark Valentine, Matthew Booth, M.J. Elliott and the other talented writers who have contributed to this collection have followed closely in the footsteps of Arthur Conan Doyle in creating a wonderful feast of Sherlockian entertainment.

«Selected and with an introduction by David Stuart Davies, this gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound to thrill and unnerve you. In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein. We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by «The Ring of Thoth» to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in «The Captain of the Polestar», we encounter a monstrous creature in «The Terror of Blue John Cap» and the beings that live above our heads in «The Brazilian Cat» and «The Leather Funnel»; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in «Lot 249». Sit down in your uneasy chair and enjoy this unique collection of chillers.»