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"À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" se présente en deux parties : "Autour de Mme Swann", où le héros fréquente les Swann à Paris, et "Noms de pays : le pays", deux ans plus tard, qui dépeint un séjour à Balbec en bord de mer. "Enfin elle, je l'aimais et ne pouvais par conséquent la voir sans ce trouble, sans ce désir de quelque chose de plus, qui ôte, auprès de l'être qu'on aime, la sensation d'aimer."

In 1785, a sensational trial began in Paris that would divide the country and captivate Europe. A leading Catholic cardinal and scion of one of the most distinguished families in France stood accused of forging the queen’s signature to obtain the most expensive piece of jewelry in Europe: a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. Known as the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, it contributed to the French populace’s disillusionment with the monarchy and precipitated the French Revolution. The Queen’s Necklace, loosely based on the Affair, is Dumas’ take on the royal scandal.

Sensual, macabre, joyous and liberating, The Flowers of Evil, or Les Fleurs du Mal, is a beautifully debauched reflection on dreams, sin, life, and death. With subjects ranging from travel to drugs, sex to faith, sleep to contemplation, Baudelaire finds new beauty in the most sinister and corrupt of situations. His morbid and nightmarish Romanticism was completely unique: cynical and bleak, but also inspiring. The book was highly controversial upon its release and Napoleon III’s government prosecuted Baudelaire for "an insult to public decency".

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

Dramatic, intense, and gripping, The Inferno of Dante is an astonishing masterpiece that no listener can afford to miss. Robert Pinsky, the distinguished American poet, preserves the burning clarity and universal relevance of this 13th-century literary masterpiece in a triumphant new translation for our times. Line by line, canto by canto, Robert Pinksy affirms The Inferno as a powerful living classic for today’s listeners.

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mrs Gereth, a wealthy widow, is dreading the day that her son, Owen, gets married. She hopes that he will marry a woman who will appreciate their home and all of its treasures as she does. So she enlists the help of Fleda Vetch to try to corrupt the impending marriage of her son and Mona Brigstock - a philistine who is determined to marry Owen in order to inherit Mrs Gereth’s valuable possessions and home by any means. Meanwhile, Fleda hides her real feelings towards Owen. Even when he ends up feeling the same way, Fleda cannot bring herself to marry him as this would force him to break his engagement to Mona, and thus betray all of her own ideals.

These are masterly readings, by renowned thespian Paul Schofield, of two substantial works of poetry by T.S. Eliot.

Make Shakespeare a part of your daily routine with Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a yearlong collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to mark important days in the Shakespeare calendar, both from his own life and from his plays.

At the opening of The Claverings (1866) the beautiful Julia Brabazon jilts her lover Harry Clavering in order to make a marriage of convenience with a wealthy but dissolute earl. Harry licks his wounds, leaves London to train as a civil engineer, and falls in love with his employer's daughter, to whom he soon becomes engaged. But when Julia returns unexpectedly as a wealthy widow, the flame of Harry's old love is rekindled.

T.S. Eliot was a towering figure in 20th-century literature, a renowned poet, playwright, and critic whose work - including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - continues to be among the most-read and influential in the canon of American literature. The Essential T.S. Eliot collects Eliot’s most lasting and important poetry in one career-spanning audiobook, with an introduction from Vijay Seshadri, one of our foremost poets.

An eloquent memoir of a young man's life transformed by literature. In A Jane Austen Education, Austen scholar William Deresiewicz turns to the author's novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. With humor and candor, Deresiewicz employs his own experiences to demonstrate the enduring power of Austen's teachings. Progressing from his days as an immature student to a happily married man, Deresiewicz's A Jane Austen Education is the story of one man's discovery of the world outside himself.

In seinem ersten Roman »Buddenbrooks« erzählt Thomas Mann nur wenig verschlüsselt die Geschichte seiner Familie und ihrer Stellung in der Vaterstadt Lübeck, soweit er sie nachvollziehen, in Einzelheiten überblicken konnte, ja sogar noch miterlebt hat. Verwandte, Honoratioren und markante Persönlichkeiten seiner Jugend werden integriert. Es ist die Geschichte des langsamen Niedergangs einer reichen Kaufmannsfamilie über vier Generationen hinweg. Gert Westphal liest diesen epochalen Roman in ganzer Länge.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a priest, a mystic, and nearly a heretic (he died before the Church court's verdict). In the 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church rehabilitated him and the late Pope John Paul II spoke of his work with fondness. However, what makes him of particular interest is the fact that he has influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, and Rudolf Steiner have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a remarkable examination of 12 illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the listener into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors.

The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil: these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Yet who was the man who created this world? This audiobook attempts to unearth the making of the first Narnian, C. S. Lewis himself.

There is no disputing that John Milton is considered one of the supreme writers in the history of English letters. Yet, for a number of reasons, many modern readers are unaware of the pleasures of his poetry and prose. These 12 lectures examine Milton's life and work in order to understand the richness and depth of his poetry, its ways of representing 17th-century English life and culture, and its impact on later writers and on English literary history as a whole.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘novel in verse’ is an epic poem that voices with enchanting beauty and literary courage the perspective of Victorian women. Aurora Leigh forges her own path to become a poet, successfully proving her worth, defying the ideals of her era, and rescuing her spirit from the suppression of a routine domestic life. Infusing the work with her own experience and passion, Browning produced a true masterpiece.

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch,regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage, and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.

Molly wants to fight Hitler by using her skills as a pilot. But the USA says no to female pilots. America is at war and Molly, a qualified pilot, is determined to use her skills in the air against the Nazis. The American Air Force isn't ready to admit female pilots just yet but the British are desperate for pilots following their devastating losses in the Battle of Britain.