Young King Henry VI has married the beautiful Margaret of Anjou but the new Queen is ruthless and ambitious. Supported by the powerful Duke of Suffolk, Margaret plots the overthrow of her enemies,...

Can it be right to persist in a bigamous marriage?

Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the...

There were four of us: George, William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency (the dog). We were in need of some rest, and it was George who first suggested a trip up the river. He said it...

A thirty-five strong cast including Leo McKern as Kutuzov, Simon Russell Beale as Pierre Bezuhov, Emily Mortimer as Natasha Rostov and Gerard Murphy as Andrei Bolkonsky, brings all the passion and...

Prunella Scales reads the classic tale by Elizabeth Gaskell - complete and unabridged.

'It is very pleasant dining with a bachelor... I only hope it is not improper; so many pleasant...

Padua holds many suitors for the hand of fair Bianca, but Bianca may not be married until her spinster sister Kate is wed. Could any man be rash enough to take Kate on? The witty adventurer...

In the second volume ,'Within a Budding Grove', of Proust’s great novel 'The Remembrance of Things Past', the narrator emerges as an actor in the drama of his own life.

Swann has now...

Julius Lévy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria....

‘Like all fathers,’ said Dickens, ‘I have a favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield.’ He is the favourite, too, of many listeners.

The story follows the trials and...

Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society.

Judi Dench, Samantha Bond and Ronald Pickup star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama from 2000, which features many of the original West End and Broadway stage cast.Esme Allen is a middle-aged...

‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ is Hardy’s most charming novel using, as it does, the four seasons of the Wessex year as a backdrop for the delightful romance of the young tranter Dick Dewy and...

T.S. Eliot described ‘The Moonstone’ as ‘the first and the greatest English detective novel’.

The stone of the title is an enormous diamond plundered from an Indian shrine...

The first of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, ’The Warden' concerns the moral dilemma of the Reverend Septimus Harding, who finds himself at the centre of a bitter conflict between defenders of...

Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor of growing fame, is determined to find his ideal in womanhood, a quest that has led to many fruitless encounters. For just as it seems that he has found his heart’s...