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At the time of Casanova's birth, the city of Venice thrived as the pleasure capital of Europe, ruled by political and religious conservatives who tolerated social vices and encouraged tourism. It was a required stop on the Grand Tour, traveled by young men coming of age, especially Englishmen. The famed...

A book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of occult charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of bonnes fortunes, of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire.

The palaces and marble stairs of old Venice are no longer desolate, but thronged with scarlet-robed senators, prisoners with the doom of the Ten upon their heads cross the Bridge of Sighs, at dead of night the nun slips out of the convent gate to the dark canal where a gondola is waiting, we assist at...

It is indeed a new experience to read this history of a man who, refraining from nothing, has concealed nothing; of one who stood in the courts of Louis the Magnificent before Madame de Pompadour and the nobles of the Ancien Regime, and had an affair with an adventuress of Denmark Street, Soho; who was...

He who opens these wonderful pages is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. The curtain draws up, and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright light stands out before us the whole life of the past; the...

Perpetual winter comes to a beautiful garden of the selfish giant who erected a wall around it to stop children playing in the garden. Unexpected consequences follow. The birds stop singing in this garden and both trees and flowers stop blossoming. One day discovers that spring has returned to the garden,...

It would be no more surprising for the discovery of a means of direct spirit communication with the spiritual life than it was to be convinced that Marconi had discovered a sure method of telegraphing and telephoning without wires. The discovery of the laws which made electricity a servant of mankind...

The artist's idea of success is very different from that of the business man, and the scientist differs from both, as does the statesman from all three. We read of successful gamblers, burglars or freebooters, but no true success was ever won or ever can be won that sets at defiance the laws of God and...

The story follows life of a young girl Maggie who is driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude. Strong themes and realism of the work made it difficult to attract commercial publishers at the time, so 22 years old Crane financed the book's publication himself. The book is now considered a masterpiece of American naturalism.

The novel follows two orphaned sisters, Lucy and Ayala Dormer, Ayala especially, and their trials, with first their relatives and other characters though subplots related to the main narrative.

Spencer Island, located 460 miles off the California coast is being auctioned. The island is uninhabited and there are only two bidders, William W. Kolderup, a very wealthy San Franciscan, and his arch-rival J. R. Taskinar, a resident of Stockton, California. Kolderup wins the auction, buying Spencer...

One day, Saint Dunstan, an Irishman by nation, and a saint by trade, left Ireland on a small mountain, which took its route toward the coast of France, and set his saintship down in the bay of St. Malo. When he had dismounted, he gave his blessing to the mountain, which, after some profound bows, took its leave, and returned to its former place.

The King, who will have nothing but what is magnificent in all he undertakes, wished to give his court an entertainment which should comprise all that the stage can furnish. To facilitate the execution of so vast an idea, and to link together so many different things, his Majesty chose for the subject...

A panoramic novel of eighteenth-century London, Cecilia, subtitled Memoirs of an Heiress, is a novel, about the trials and tribulations of a young upper class woman who must negotiate London society for the first time and who falls in love with a social superior.