Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy who goes to live with his grandparents following the death of his father. Gorky's depiction of 19th-century Russia through the eyes of his younger self is remarkable. As he recalls memories of his youth, contrasting themes and emotions...

The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety. Musical excerpts include the Cello Concerto, the 'New World'...

'The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria's streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms — moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.' In Balthazar, the second volume in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the story and the characters come more clearly into focus. Darley, the reflective Englishman, receives from...

Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society. Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual...

An insider's view of court life and culture during the Renaissance, here is the handiwork of a 16th-century diplomat who was called upon to resolve the differences in a war of etiquette among the Italian nobility. The ultimate resource on aristocratic manners, it remains the most definitive account of life among the Renaissance nobility.

Mikhail Lermontov's pioneering psychological novel, "A Hero of Our Time", is probably his most impactful work, one which influenced the works of other great Russian authors such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The novel's narrative is the story of Pechorin a young officer in the army whose story is told in five non-chronological parts. Drawing upon his own experiences in the military, Lermontov creates a fascinating anti-hero in Pechorin, a man who is...

Devastated by the First World War and plunged into political controversy, Romania's every hope accompanies its queen on her mission to Paris to lobby for international recognition of its great unification at the 1919 peace talks.