In a panoramic survey of the Victorian Age, this work describes the men and women who brought the modern age into being. The capitalist world was challenged by the ideas of such men as Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw - here they are. Here are also the lofty and famous and here too are the poor and the obscure.

In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low- life in London, and a frank personal portrait of the young Boswell.

A biography of Samuel Johnson which concerns the last twenty years of his life. It establishes Johnson's centrality in 18th century letters. It places him in a literary and cultural context.

A classic of Victorian literature, Tom Brown's Schooldays has long had an influence well beyond the middle-class, public school world it describes.

A biography of Charlotte Bronte that describes her life of claustrophobic confinement in a Yorkshire parsonage belied by the heights of imagination to which she was able to soar in her writing. It also describes the 'extraordinary genius' that seemed to have touched her family and the intense suffering that also visited them.