... This dark, unforgettable story of Catherine Earnshaw and the swarthy Heathcliff 'is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath', and Emily Bronte records the progress of their love with such truth, imagination, and emotional intensity that a plain tale of the York-shire moors acquires the depth and simplicity of ancient tragedy.
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However, human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse Riding'…
In Hard Times, says George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens means to show us "that it is not our disorder but our order that is horrible; that it is not our criminals but our magnates that are robbing and murdering us ..."
In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying …
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi'…
CONTENTS William Makepeace Thackeray 1. Jonathan Swift John Henry Newman 1. The Idea of a University a. What is a University? b. Site of a University c. University Life at Athens Matthew Arnold 1. The Study of Poetry John Ruskin 1. Sesame and Lilies a. Lecture I. – Sesame : Of Kings’ Treasuries b. Lecture II. – Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens Walter Bagehot 1. John Mil…