European category: 23182 books

In 1491, as Machiavelli advised popes and princes and Leonardo da Vinci astonished the art world, a young man boarded a ship in Portugal bound for Ireland. He would be greeted upon arrival as the rightful heir to the throne of England. The trouble was, England already had a king. The most intriguing...

This is a study of Kafka’s tragic vision of life, his profoundly disturbing awareness of man’s utter loneliness in a pitiless universe, and his artistry in effecting a strange intimate fusion between symbolism and realism—between anguished poetic narration and the terrifying reality of an absurd...

Offers a history of the monarchy of Belgium, a country artificially created in 1817. This book argues that the pan-European super-state resembles a 'Greater-Belgium' rather than a 'Greater-Switzerland'.

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults ‘who should know better’, in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the ‘Ninth Art’ and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessinée [comic strip] has its own national institutions,...

This file includes: Catline 1850, translated by Anders Orbeck; The Warrior's Barrow (AKA The Burial Mound) 1850, translatd by Anders Orbeck; Olaf Liljerkrans 1856, translated by Anders Orbeck; The Feast at Solhoug 1855, translated by William Archer and Mary Morrison; Lady Inger of Ostrat 1855, translated...

'The people are silent' So ends Pushkin's great historical drama Boris Godunov, in which Boris's reign as Tsar witnesses civil strife and intrigue, brutality and misery. Its legacy is an uncertain future for the new Tsar whose inauguration is met with devastating silence by the people. Pushkin's dramatic...

Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills … Goethe was probably the last true ‘Renaissance Man’. Although employed as a...

Svetlana Boym was a prolific writer, a charismatic professor, a novelist, and a public intellectual. She was also a fiercely resourceful and reflective immigrant; her most resonant book, The Future of Nostalgia, was deeply rooted in that experience. Even after The Future of Nostalgia carried her fame...

THIS book originated in a series of eight lectures on ‘Russian Literature during the Nineteenth Century’ which Peter Kropotkin delivered in March 1901, at the Lowell Institute, in Boston. Given the impossibility of exhausting so wide a subject as Russian Literature within the limits of one book,...

The foremost dramatist of his age, Ibsen changed theatre forever with his realistic dialogue and depiction of contemporary social problems. Here are four of his greatest works: Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Lady From the Sea, and John Gabriel Borkman.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War...

Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming...

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation,...

First published in 1572, The Lusiads is one of the greatest epic poems of the Renaissance, immortalizing Portugal's voyages of discovery with an unrivalled freshness of observation. At the centre of The Lusiads is Vasco da Gama's pioneer voyage via southern Africa to India in 1497-98. The first European...