Oxford University Press Uk: 66 books

How would a creature limited to two dimensions be able to grasp the possibility of a third? In Flatland, A Square's linear world is invaded by a Sphere bringing the gospel of the third dimension. Part geometry lesson, part social satire, the novel enlarges readers' imaginations beyond the limits of...

Packed with facts, attributions, and entertaining anecdotes about his contemporaries, Vasari's collection of biographical accounts also presents a highly influential theory of the development of Renaissance art. Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, who represent the infancy of art, Vasari considers...

The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro and The Guilty Mother were the first plays to use a set of recurring characters who develop over time. They chronicle the slide of the ancien regime into revolution and Figaro was seen as a threat to the establishment. The impertinent, bustling servant...

Pliny's letters provide a fascinating insight into Roman life in the period 97 to 112 AD. They document politics, social life, religion, the educational system, the treatment of slaves and include a vivid description of the eruption of Vesuvius. This is a lively and sympathetic new translation. -...

Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural...

Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. Attacked at the time as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery', it overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes,...

Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret's ready sympathy with the workers and her growing attraction to the charismatic mill owner, John...

Collected here in a single volume for the first time, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government, and The Subjection of Women show Mill applying his liberal utilitarian philosophy to a range of issues that remain vital today - issues of the nature of ethics, the scope...

John Sutherland provides a fascinating introduction to a new edition of what T.S.Eliot called 'the first and greatest of all English detective novels'. - ;'the first and greatest of English detective novels' T.S.Eliot A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder....

Drawing directly on her own unhappy experiences, Anne Bront--euml--;'s first-person narrative describes the almost unbelievable pressures endured by nineteenth-century governesses - the isolation, the frustration, and the insensitive and sometimes cruel treatment meted out by employers and their families....

Captain Scott's own account of his tragic race with Roald Amundsen for the South Pole thrilled the world in 1913. This new edition of his Journals publishes for the first time a complete list of the changes made to Scott's original text before publication. - ;'For God's sake look after our people'...

A cipher message and a horrible murder in a Sussex village begin this dark and powerful tale as Holmes battles with the forces of the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty. Central to the novel lies the story of a terrorist brotherhood and the hold it acquired over an American mining valley. At the...

The nine lives in this selection include those of Lycurgus, Pericles, Solon, Nicias, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Cimon, Agesilaus, and Alexander. Portraying virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided, Plutarch explores with great insight the interplay of character and political action. This new...

Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. This fluent new translation is accompanied by comprehensive notes and an introduction...