We are inside a pre-biotic chemical reaction some 4,500 million years ago, as it suddenly forms a membrane and becomes a prokaryot cell. Then a eukaryot cell. Then a multicellular organism. That's for the first chapter, and from the cell's viewpoint....

Ford Madox Ford's post-war masterpiece, "Parade's End", is recognised as one of the great British novels about the First World War. This selection from his other extensive writings about the war, published and unpublished, sheds light on the tetralog...

The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence, was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The...

The place: Palermo, 1783. The barons reject the reforms of the principled viceroy Caracciolo, pursuing their feuds and petty plotting. Their wives indulge in forbidden French novels. And porcine abbot Vella, forty years old, is drawn like a fly to th...