Wordsworth

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.

Modern views of Columbus are overshadowed by guilt about past conquests. Credit for discovering the New World, we are told, belongs to its original inhabitants rather than any European, and Columbus gave those inhabitants nothing apart from death, disease and destruction. Yet for the Old World of Europe the four voyages of Columbus brought revelation where before there had been only myths and guesswork. People had thought it was only the great distance that made it impossible to reach Asia sailing west from Spain. No one had predicted that a vast continent stood in the way. And indeed, for Columbus himself, the revolution of understanding was too much to comprehend. He had counted on a new route to Asia that would bring him glory, riches and titles, and the thought of an unknown and undeveloped continent held no attractions. The trials and disappointments of the great explorer are graphically detailed in this biography first published in 1828, when Washington Irving was America’s most famous writer.

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.

When Richard Hannay, the hero of «The Thirty-nine Steps», is recalled by the Head of British Intelligence from the Western Front at a critical moment in the battle for France, he has little idea that his contribution to the war effort will be much more crucial than the command of his Brigade in Flanders. In his strange odyssey to unravel the most sinister of conspiracies — to defeat the allies in the West — he travels from an idyllic manor house in the Cotswolds to a provincial Garden City where pacifism is the order of the day, through Scotland and London under attack, and thence back to the trenches, and the greatest battle of the First World War. There, amid the devastation and the squalor, he finds both love and a horrifying glimpse of chemical warfare before the thrilling denoument in the skies above the battlefield.

Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the third describes the retribution wrought by Flosi and Kari. The saga is remarkable not only for the details of everyday life — the farming, the feasting and the charcoal-burning — but also for the social structure of the society in which that life took place — the Althing or Parliament, the lawmaking and the lawgiving. The grandeur of the narrative and the beauty and distinction of the characters mark Njal's Saga as an essential text for all who love adventure and great literature.

»The figure of my wife came in...it came straight towards the bed...its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable». Edith Nesbit, best known as the author of «The Railway Children» and other children's classics, was also the mistress of the ghost story and tales of terror. She was able to create genuinely chilling narratives in which the returning dead feature strongly. Sadly, these stories have been neglected for many years, but now, at last, they are back in print. In this wonderful collection of eerie, flesh-creeping yarns, we encounter love that transcends the grave, reanimated corpses, vampiric vines, vengeful ghosts and other dark delights to make you feel fearful. These vintage spooky stories, tinged with horror, are told in a bold, forthright manner that makes them seem as fresh and unsettling as today's headlines.

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.

G. K. Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He went to St Paul's School and then on to the Slade School of Art. In 1900, he was asked to write a few magazine articles on art criticism, and from that beginning went on to become not only one of the most prolific writers of all time but, in the opinion of some, the best writer of the twentieth century. Chesterton, an absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing around 21 stone, was a well-known figure invariably to be seen in voluminous cape and crumpled hat, with tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose and swordstick in hand. Despite a chaotic life-style this was the genius who wrote «The Everlasting Man», a book which led a young atheist named C. S. Lewis to become a Christian; «The Napoleon of Notting Hill», a novel which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence; and, an essay in the «Illustrated London News» that inspired Mahatma Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. He wrote countless books, poems, plays, novels and short stories — most famously those about his creation, the priest-detective Father Brown. In 1909 Chesterton moved with his wife to Beaconsfield, at that time a village near to London, and in 1922 he converted to Catholicism. He died on 14 June 1936, at his home and is buried in the Beaconsfield Catholic Cemetery.

The delicate artistry and lyrical prose of Woolf's novels have established her as a writer of sensitivity and profound talent. Virginia Woolf displays genuine humanity and concern for the experiences that enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party and her thoughts on that one day, and the interior monologues of others with interwoven lives reveal the characters of the central protagonists. «To the Lighthouse» is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. Based on her early experiences, it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires. It is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War. «Orlando», 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. 'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', said Woolf of The Waves. Regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time'.

»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.

First published in 1909, «The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life» is a lively biography of England and arguably the world’s greatest playwright and poet by an ardent admirer. Pursuing the thesis that a man so elusive in the few surviving documents is found full blown in very one of his works, Frank Harris, a successful journalist and editor, turns his hand to creating an impressionistic portrait that is a t once a highly idiosyncratic exploration of the plays and a telling of the life through them. A product of late-Victorian Bardolatry, Harris’s Shakespeare was both hailed and criticised in its day, the New York Times reviewer declaring that ‘This is the book for which we have waited a lifetime’, while academic critics attacked it as ‘nonsense’. Controversial and self-confident, this biographical study retains its interest as a work of period charm. Bristling with fresh, if not always convincing, arguments, combative in style, and with a full battery of belletristic effects, Harris, as ever, pulls off a tour de force.

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.

It is the autumn of 1888. Following the successful conclusion of the investigation into the affair of the Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson have returned from Dartmoor, little realising that fate will see them back in Devon before the year is out. Holmes receives a potentially lethal package, the first strand in the tangled skein, which he will need to unravel before this new adventure is resolved. A threat to Holmes' life, murders on Hampstead Heath, and a strange phantom lady lead Holmes and Watson into the most dangerous investigation they have ever undertaken — an encounter which brings them face to face with evil itself, embodied in Count Dracula, the Lord of the Undead.

This astonishing series of aphorisms, put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, contains the kernel of Nietzsche's thought. 'God is dead', he tells us. Christianity is decadent, leading mankind into a slave morality concerned not with this life, but with the next. Nietzsche emphasises the 'Ubermensch, or Superman, whose will to power makes him the creator of a new heroic mentality. The intensely felt ideas are expressed in prose-poetry of indefinable beauty.

This book contains more cocktails than any other — 1,500 of them, ranging from classic Martinis to unblushing modern concoctions such as Sex on the Beach. Recipes are user friendly, assembled on a 'unit' basis that clearly shows the proportions needed to make the perfect cocktail — without fuss. Ingredients and equipment are easy to acquire, techniques straightforward. Bewildering measures — 'jigger', 'half-gill' 3/4 fl oz — are avoided. There is much entertainment to be found in these pages too, with revealing anecdotes about many of the cocktails, and generous sprinklings of apposite quotations, risque jokes and little curiosities. The Ultimate Cocktail Book is more than a reference guide, it's a concocter's companion and a source of enlightenment. A volume tailor-made, in short, for good mixers.

Upanishads are mankind's oldest works of philosophy, predating the earliest Greek philosophy. They are the concluding part of the Vedas, the ancient Indian sacred literature, and mark the culmination of a tradition of speculative thought first expressed in the Rig-Veda more than 4000 years ago. Remarkable for their meditative depth, spirit of doubt and intellectual honesty, the Upanishads are concerned with the knowledge of the Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, and Man's relationship with it. The name Upanishad is derived from the face-to-face mode of imparting knowledge — in the utmost sanctity and secrecy, to prevent its trivialisation or perversion. Composed in Sanskrit between 900 and 600 BC, the Upanishads presented here are by far the oldest and most important of those that exist. Twelve were first translated more than a hundred years ago, and have been extensively revised and edited. The thirteenth is an entirely new translation by Suren Navlakha.

The wolf has always been a creature of legend and romance, while kings, sorcerers and outlaws have been proud to be called by the name of the wolf, it’s no wonder, then, that tales of transformation between man and wolf are so powerful and persistent. This original collection offers some of the greatest, rarest and most unusual werewolf stories ever. From the forests of Transylvania to the ordered lawns of an English country estate, here are all the classic aspects of the tale. You will encounter shadows that lope under the moon, chilling howls, family curses, crimson feasts, the desperate chase and the deathly duel. But you will also find the werewolf in less expected guises – as an adversary for Sherlock Holmes, as a myth of the Wild West, and as a figure restored to its origins in folk and fairy tales. With an informative introduction by Mark Valentine that follows the traces of the werewolf in literature, and its links to «Dracula», «Jekyll & Hyde», and «The Hound of the Baskervilles», this superb collection will make you fear the full moon.

Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and «The Woman in White» is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in north London, encounters a solitary, terrified and beautiful woman dressed in white, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. The intricate plot is peopled with a finely characterised cast, from the peevish invalid Mr Fairlie to the corpulent villain Count Fosco and the enigmatic woman herself.

This title is edited by M.R. James. In 1888 Henry James wrote 'There was the customary novel by Mr Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight'. «Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Stories» are tales selected from Le Fanu's stories which mostly appeared in «The Dublin University» Magazine and other periodicals, and their haunting, sinister qualities still have an enormous appeal for the modern reader. The great M.R. James, who collected and introduces the stories in this book, considered that Le Fanu 'stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.'