Cathedral Classics - Böcker

This is Lenin's seminal text on social revolution and how to achieve it, published some 16 years before Russia's October 1917 Revolution. His plan to overturn the Czar's ruthless autocratic regime proposes the establishment of a cadre of "pro...

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Nietzsche claimed that the "Twilight of the Idols" was a general introduction to his philosophy. Against the current of his times, he attacked Greek civilization as the ultimate source of decadence. Socrates and Plato are vilified, and t...

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The Double charts the psychological collapse of Yakov Golyadkin, an awkward, angst-ridden office-worker in St Petersburg. Golyadkin suddenly becomes aware that his office contains a Double of himself, a creature who floats effortlessly through lif...

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Although Henry James was himself none too fond of 'The Europeans', the novel has nevertheless proved to be a firm favourite with readers ever since its publication in 1878. The juxtaposition of two cultures with their differing values and expectat...

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Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil' is a tour de force of moral and ethical philosophy. First published in 1886, the book comprises almost three hundred 'statements' - from pithy one-liners, to long convoluted arguments of a page or more. Nietzsche...

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'Dubliners' is James Joyce's attempt to portray a 'slice of life' of his beloved capital in fifteen short stories recording events in the lives of its citizens, while the tales themselves progress from a consideration of childhood to maturity, old...

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Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome from 161 - 180 AD. His rule was absolute and - as the lives of other Emperors reveal only too clearly - he was able, with impunity, to indulge in any vice, crime or licentious behaviour he chose. Yet Marcus Aure...

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In 'A Doll's House', Ibsen questions the subservience of married women and their role in the family. The play follows the development of Nora, whose life of wifely comfort and apparent careless domesticity is thrown into turmoil by the appearance ...

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'The Analects of Confucius' has had the most profound effect on Chinese Society, and influenced much of S. E. Asia. The book was not written by Confucius, but by his disciples some 30 to 50 years after the Master's death in 479 BCE. However, the m...

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Samuel Butler's irreverent satire, 'Erewhon', castigates the hypocrisy of both religion and conventional social mores, and pours scorn on the unthinking acceptance that makes such beliefs possible. In Erewhon (an anagram of 'Nowhere') 'normal' beh...

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Published in 1898 and never out of print since that time, 'The War of the Worlds' is one of the most influential science fiction novels ever written, and the seminal work for all the many 'alien invasion' tales that have followed. The amazing prod...

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'Orlando' is a historical fantasy in which the eponymous hero remains alive for over three centuries, but ages physically just 36 years. Over this huge span of time, Orlando has many strange adventures, chief among them being his sex-change from a...

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'My Antonia' was first published in 1918. It was Willa Cather's fourth novel and her first recognized masterwork. The book follows the parallel stories of Antonia Shimerdas, a Bohemian immigrant, and the orphan Jim Burden, viewing their lives from...

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In this, the fifth and final Richard Hannay adventure, John Buchan makes his hero an older, wiser and more yielding character (the book was written a full decade after the fourth Hannay novel). The Island of Sheep is one of Buchan's least known wo...

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This is Goethe's first novel, published in 1774. Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. Goethe upset the ...

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Aphra Benn was a phenomenon: a lone female who was by turns a well-respected playwright, a spy, a convict, and the author of 'Oroonoko', the first English novel. Behn tells the (reputedly true) story of an African Prince, betrayed into slavery, wh...

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Walt Whitman was born in 1819, and from an early age evinced an intense curiosity and wonder in the miracle of Existence, and its ultimate meaning. In his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, Whitman brings a new voice to America Literature - a v...

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Horace Walpole is credited by many with the invention of the Gothic Novel. The author claimed to have written 'The Castle of Otranto' - a medieval mystery story set in a haunted castle peopled by fantastic characters - after s night of dreams. It ...

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In 'The Good Soldier' Ford uses the theme of adultery among his four main characters to examine the basis of social reality, the difference between 'normal' and 'strange', between what is 'good' and what 'evil'. His narrator gradually comes to rea...

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John Stuart Mill's classic has at its heart a brave (some might say Quixotic) attempt to define both the constraints on individual freedom, and the degree of coercion governments may legitimately use to limit that freedom. His solution is a "...

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H G Wells is one of the 'fathers' of Science Fiction. His novel 'The First Men in the Moon' chronicles humanity's first faltering steps to the stars. The story uses a human-meets-alien adventure to juxtapose two characters whose temperaments perso...

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'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' is the world's first surrealist book, written in 1865, at a time when the word surrealism had not yet been invented. The author of this dream-like fantasy, full of puns and ironic comments on adult life, was Lewi...

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A stirring tale of heroism, monsters and battle, 'Beowulf' is famous as the first epic poem in English literature. Written down sometime in the 7th century, an oral version of the poem was probably recited by bards several hundred years earlier. B...

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Thomas Hammerlein was born in Kempen, North Germany, some six hundred years ago. He took the cowl at the age of twenty, entering the monastery of St Agnes where, now known as Thomas Kempis ('Thomas from Kempen'), he spent the remaining seventy yea...

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Max Heindel's mysticism is set firmly in the western tradition of the Gnosis. Following a series of disappointments and ill health, Heindel claims to have been visited by a Spiritual Being, who he identified as an Elder Brother of the Rosicrucian ...

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   This account stands as a classic among autobiographies, a compelling and easy read about a man who, from lowly beginnings in Boston, rose to become a hugely-respected public servant, writer, scientist and inventor and who went on to p...

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“The finest historical short stories ever written” is Conan-Doyle expert Owen Edwards’ verdict on the Brigadier Gerard series.  In this new complete edition, which includes 55 original illustrations by W B Wollen, the aged B...

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   Frankenstein was written, said Shelley, to “curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.’’    It succeeds in doing just that and stands as the classic of gothic horror novels, inspiring many scre...

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A best seller of its time, Olaudah Equiano’s story of his life as a slave in the second half of the eighteenth century continues to this day to aid our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and our fight against modern slavery.  &nb...

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