Item category 1: Classics

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become and iconic figure in post-war fiction

When Lorenzo de' Medici seized control of the Florentine Republic in 1512, he summarily fired the Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Signoria and set in motion a fundamental change in the way we think about politics. The person who held the aforementioned office with the tongue-twisting titl...

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Prof...

First published in the 1920's, The Prophet, Gibran's hugely popular guide to living, has sold millions of copies worldwide and is the most famous work of religious fiction of the twentieth century.

Obsessed with sex!‘ said Jassy, 'there’s nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I’m a pygmalionist.’ In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding. ‘Ducks can only copulate,’ said Linda, after studying this for a while...

"A barbed attack on the British class system, Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is t...