On a visit to a provincial town to see his sister Nina who is suffering from cancer, Alexei Laptev, who works for his father’s Moscow haberdashery business, falls in love with Yulia, the daughter of h
One of the most powerful and shockingly controversial novellas by Marquis de SadeWhen the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense o
In ‘The Waves’, a young man falls dangerously in love with his tenant downstairs who is about to get married; in ‘The Signorina’, a woman, disillusioned with her suitor’s inability to declare his feel
Saddened with his country’s loss of freedom, disillusioned with life and racked with loneliness and ennui, university student Jacopo Ortis can only find some comfort in the company of his friends and
Rising from humble beginnings as a foundling, Castruccio Castracani came to prominence as one of the most powerful and shrewd warlords in Italy. Indeed, Machiavelli argues, so great was his vigour and
As Paris is shaken by a gang of murderous thieves, the aristocratic Mademoiselle de Scudéri pens a poem to poke fun at the cowardly lovers who now fear to go out at night to see their mistresses. But
When Emily Dickinson died in 1886, having published only a tiny selection of her verse anonymously in journals and newspapers, she left behind a chest containing almost 1,800 poems written on notebook
“In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven… two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employe
"Having frittered away his family's fortune in Paris, the profligate Guido il Cortese incurs the wrath of his future father-in-law and finds himself in exile from his native Genoa and harbouring plans
Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works, including a comedy and several poems, Lorenzino de' Medici remains one o
Stephen Glennard is in desperate need of money. So when he becomes aware of the potential value of a series of passionate love letters written to him by the recently deceased author Margaret Aubyn, he
In the somnolent Flemish town of Quiquendone disagreements are unheard of, courtships might last a decade and not a ripple of activity can be seen at all. But when the mysterious Dr Ox and his assista
In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such
