Roger May

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is George Orwell's savagely satirical portrait of the literary life and is based loosely on his own experiences of writing life and working at Westrope’s Bookshop in Hampstead.London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war...

Upon its first publication in 1846, Poor Folk was an immediate critical triumph. The influential critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that 'the novel reveals secrets about life and character-types in Russia of a kind never dreamt of by anyone else,' and...

Featuring some of Lewis Carroll's most famous and best-loved poems - including Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark - as well as lesser-known gems such as Brother and Sister and My Fairy, this production wonderfully illustrates Carroll's fondness...

The Double was published in 1846. A classic of doppelgänger literature, it is considered one of Dostoyvesky's most significant shorter works.Our protagonist, Golyadkin Senior, is persecuted by his double, Golyadkin Junior, who resembles him closely in...

From the Stone Age to the 21st century, The History of Britain chronicles the epic story of this small but turbulent kingdom.Listen to the incredible events of the Norman invasions, the execution of Charles I, the uprisings in Dark Age Wales, the...

Oscar Wilde claimed that The Humiliated and Insulted is "not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces," and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged...

In the village of Iping, a strange man arrives at a local inn wrapped in bandages. He refuses to leave his room where he is carrying out experiments to make himself invisible. The stranger's success has grave implications for everyone. When he...

Unpublished at the time of her death, The Professor is the first novel written by Charlotte Bronte?, and the seed of her later books, Jane Eyre and Villette. The narrator of the tale, William Crimsworth, tells a story of courage and ambition among...

At a dinner party in Richmond, the host tells an astonishing story of his travels into the future. At first it seems that man has moved on to a higher plane of existence – suffering and war seem to have been eliminated. But in fact there are two races...

The young Sergei is summoned from St Petersburg by his uncle, the retired colonel Yegor Rostanev, to the remote country estate of Stepanchikovo. Rostanev’s household, populated by a medley of remarkable characters, is dominated by the figure of Foma...

When the aging Russian Prince, Prince K., arrives in the town of Mordasov, Marya Alexandrovna Moskaleva, a doyenne of local society life, takes him under her protection with the aim of engineering his marriage with her 23-year-old daughter Zina.Yet...