Leads us through the history of the Venice city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and a trading empire, the wars against Napoleon and the tourist invasions of today.

Describes London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs. This title includes chapters on the history of silence and the history of light, the history of childhood and the history of suicide, the history of Cockney speech and the history of drink.

Offers a guide to this extraordinary river and the towns and villages which line it. Exploring its history since prehistoric times, this book shows the fishes that swam in the river and the boats that plied its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and malaria; locks, weirs and embankments; bridges, docks and palaces.

James Mallord William Turner entered the Royal Academy at 14 and a year later was exhibiting. His first loves were architecture, engraving and watercolours, and the country houses, cathedrals and landscape of England. He was mean with money, never married, and spent a lot of his life living in taverns. His dying words were: 'The Sun is God.'

First published in 1990, this shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.

Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn in the secluded village of Headington, near Oxford. The coroner's office in Clarendon Street provides corpses - but they have often died of violence and drowning: they are damaged and putrifying.

In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment - but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one.

Sister Clarice, a nun in the House of St Mary at Clerkenwell, experiences visions. This novel begins with The Nun's Tale , and continues with the The Friar's Tale , The Merchant's Tale and The Clerk's Tale , building a portrait of medieval London, where people are disenchanted by the Church.

Dicken's last, unfinished novel published in 1870, Edwin Drood is a murder mystery with an atmosphere all of its own. The novelist's unique descriptive powers are brought to bear on a drama which foreshadows the detective stories of Conan Doyle on the one hand and the nightmarish novels of Kafka on the other. Set, like so many nineteenth-century English novels, in an apparently innocuous ...

At first the interruption to the boredom of Sherlock Holmes seems to have little to do with crime. A governess, whose father vanished ten years ago and who has been receiving money each year, now needs an escort to meet her unknown benefactor. But before the night is over, murder has occurred.

Fascinated by the identity of the mysterious Mr W.H. to whom Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets, Oscar Wilde determined to prove to the world that it was in fact a gentleman by the name of Will Hughes.

Offers a biography of Shakespeare, this book reads like the work of a contemporary meeting Shakespeare. It is a depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

A selection the author's critical writings, of short fiction and poetry that demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind.

A biography of William Blake who was a poet, painter, engraver and visionary.

Originally published in 1928, this classic story by Virginia Woolf was modelled on her friend Vita Sackville-West's personality. Orlando chooses her own sexual identity as she lives through three centuries as both a man and a woman.

Offers an account of 19th-century London, so well known from Charles Dickens' much-loved novels. This book draws on descriptions of life in the capital from original letters, diaries and newspapers, as well as Dickens' own social commentary, to paint a portrait of a city undergoing massive social changes.

Clive Boursnell's photographs capture the atmosphere of the old Covent Garden Market in the 1960s and 70s.

In this novel the light and the dark sides of 19th-century London flow into each other, attracting the attention of famous names such as Marx and Gissing, but also of less well-known characters, who play a significant role in a tale that is a mixture of fable, adventure and Gothic comedy.

Covers the history of the river of Thames. This book enables the reader to learn about the fishes that swim in the river and the boats that ply on its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and sewers; locks, weirs and embankments.

Pre-eminent as a courtier and a humanist, a friend to Henry VIII and the author of Utopia , Thomas More is one of the great figures of England's history. This is a portrait of the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr, and of the social and cultural world in which he lived.