From the text: This Simple Sabotage Field Manual Strategic Services (Provisional) is published.

It is the year 2072, sixty years on from the scarlet plague that decimated the earth's population.

We may believe in the doctrine of Progress or we may not, but in either case.

Longfellow wrote his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha in 1855.

Winesburg, Ohio is a series of loosely linked short stories set in the fictional town.

Vathek is one of the earliest and most influential Gothic novels.

Aphra Behn was one of the first professional English female writers.

Sonnets from the Portuguese is the collection of love poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Though Frances Burney's novels significantly influenced writers such as Jane Austen.

Evelina is the daughter of an English aristocrat, but is brought up in the country.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was the poem which brought Lord Byron public recognition.

In his satiric poem Don Juan, Lord Byron refigures the legend as a man easily seduced by women.

The Shadow Line is a novella by Joseph Conrad. A young man becomes captain of a ship in the Orient

Pierre Corneille's tragicomedy Le Cid is based on the legend of the same name.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is a novella by American author Stephen Crane.

Father Goriot is one of French novelist Honore de Balzac's most important pieces of writing.

Honoré de Balzac's renowned Lost Illusions consists of two volumes.

Life is a Dream is a play about free will and fate.

Considered the inventor of the essay itself, Michel de Montaigne published Essays.

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit is, according to Dickens, a novel about selfishness.