The soul-consuming and friction-wearing tendency of this hurrying, grasping, competing age is the excuse for this book.

IT may possibly be thought, that there is no great need of going about to define or describe the Will.

The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, focuses on a slave named Uncle Tom to weave a portrayal of the cruelty of slavery, finding redemption in the idea that Christian love can conquer something so destructive.

One world's richest and best-known people in his day, Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company and a pioneering innovator of mass production.

G.K. Chesterton lends his witty, astute and sardonic prose to the much loved figure of Saint Francis of Assis.

The Cherry Orchard was written by Chekhov as a comedy, but directed by Stanislavski as a tragedy on its premier.

Edward FitzGerald gave the title The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to his translation of poetry attributed to the Persian poet, astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam (1048-1123).

The Republic is Plato's most famous work and one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy and politics.

Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life places before the reader in a handy form an account of the principal ideas and beliefs held by the ancient Egyptians concerning the resurrection and the future life, which is derived wholly from native religious works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.