Presents the poems that combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation and evoke the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature.

This is the prose masterpiece of the Heian era of the 10th and 11th centuries, which is recognized as a great period in Japanese literature. It is an account of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture which made such a masterpiece possible.

Wu Ch'eng-en wrote Monkey in the middle of the 16th century, adding to an ancient Chinese legend his own touches of delicacy and humour. The result is a jumble of the absurd and the profound, of religion and history, of anti-bureaucratic satire and pure poetry.

Offers satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society. This work draws forth a world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. It portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - and the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves.