This Penguin Little Black Classics edition collects two stories: the novella-length White Nights and the short story Bobek, both by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer whose name I’ve seen spelt differently depending on who’s publishing him, and many publishers publish him. Why is that?! It’s his name! The vagaries of the Russian language eh?
This is Plato’s account of his mentor, Socrates, as he met his accusers in Athenian court to defend himself against charges of blasphemy and corrupting the young.
Socrates makes short work of the weak arguments made by his chief accuser, Meletus, through logical deconstruction. What’s interesting is that the defence isn’t really of Socrates against his charges but of his life and philosophy, which is basically what the trial is really about.
A man is invited to a dilapidated castle in the Spanish mountains to recover from an illness or something. The family who own the house are aristocrats who’ve fallen on hard times. The son is a bit of a simpleton, the mother is quietly crazy (until she isn’t), and the daughter, Olalla, is eerily beautiful. Nothing happens, then the narrator falls for Olalla but they can’t be together and then it’s over.
Thomas de Quincey’s 1827 essay, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is a satirical take on the English public’s fascination with gory murder, inspired by the 1811 Ratcliff Highway killings.
Richard Hakluyt’s The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe collects the two accounts, snappily titled: “The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and there hence about the whole globe of the earth, begun in the year of our Lord 1577.” and “The prosperous voyage of the worshipful Thomas Candish of Trimley in the County of Suffolk Esquire, into the South Sea, and from thence round about the circumference of the whole earth, begun in the year of our Lord 1586, and finished 1588.”
This Penguin Little Black Classic collects Thrown Away, False Dawn, In the House of Suddhoo, The Bisara of Pooree, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows, and The Story of Muhammed Din, all taken from Plain Tales from the Hills.
This Penguin Little Black Classic collects seven of the Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Master Huntsman, The Robber Bridegroom, The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs, The Six Servants, The Bremen Town Band, Snowwhite, and Lazy Harry (all translated by David Luke).
Though an artist in his own right, Giorgio Vasari is best known for his histories of famous Renaissance artists. This is an extract from his three-volume Lives of the Artists looking at Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka Caligula (Latin for “little soldier’s boot”, a childhood nickname), if he’s known by anyone today, it’s for being the maddest emperor of Ancient Rome - and there were a few mental bastards! The impression stems from incidents like trying to make his horse head of the Senate and thinking he was a god who could talk to the sea.
