AS a man chooses his coat for its wearing qualities or for the moment's passing whim, so does he choose his destiny.

Salome is a tragic play written by Oscar Wilde, which tells the biblical story of Salome.

Doctor Pascal concludes Zola's epic Rougon-Macquart series.

Alice in Wonderland (also known as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), from 1865, is the peculiar and imaginative tale of a girl who falls down a rabbit-hole into a bizarre world of eccentric and unusual creatures.

Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow collects together eight Sherlock Holmes stories.

Buddhism is a religion which must be viewed from many angles.

Inspiring countless business, political and military leaders (Napoleon, Mao Zedong and General MacArthur among them), The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise by Sun Tzu from the 6th century BC.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is an important philosophical text by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

The School for Husbands (L'École des maris) is a work by Molière (the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), a French playwright who is often considered to be one of Western literature's great masters of comedy.

Letters on England gathers together Voltaire's essays about his time in England between 1726 and 1728.

Rousseau wrote about the difficulty of being a good individual within an inherently corrupting collectivity: society.

While Bram Stoker didn't invent the vampire, his 1897 novel Dracula has been the defining force in the popularity and evolution of vampire mythology today.

Considered by many to contain pioneering works of English writing, Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights collects together his short stories that were originally published in periodicals between 1877 and 1880.

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), were born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in the German state of Hesse.

A Russian prince returns to Saint Petersburg after a long absence in Switzerland, where he was undergoing treatment for epilepsy.

The Sonnets compiles 154 Sonnets written by Shakespeare on all manner of themes from love and fidelity to politics and lineage.

The Woman in White is credited with being the first of the sensation novels, and one of the finest examples of the genre.

The industrialist, businessman, and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835 - 1919) established a gospel of wealth that can be neither ignored nor forgotten, and set a pace in distribution that succeeding millionaires have followed as a precedent.

The Pickwick Papers was Dickens' first published novel and the first ever publishing phenomenon with illegal copies, theatrical performances and merchandise.

Nicholas Nickleby is left responsible for his mother and sister when his father dies.