'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education from 18

The everyday realities of life in the city of Hogarth, Fielding and Dr Johnson, based on contemporary evidence, by the author of the best-selling ELIZABETH'S LONDON.

Throws a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, this novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'.

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.

Containing various essays, this work discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience.