This book is a mixed collection of stories linked only by the fact that, at some time, an idea sparked the author's imagination which then emerged into a story. An encounter in a waiting room...an unexpected journey experience...an overheard word...a holiday encounter...the supernatural.

For a generation Andrew Lang has delighted the children, and grown-ups too for that matter, with his fairy books. This is of a new sort, for the tales are of many different kinds. Some are true, like the history of the man who met in America the other man whom he had seen hanged for murdering in England. Then we have several stories of adventure that happened to historic personages, besides stories of treasure hunts, Greek mythology, wild witches and red Indians. " There are no more delightful fairy tales than those written, translated and adapted by Andrew Lang. He has eliminated the gruesomeness from the old best loved fairy tales, and introduced many less familiar tales of other lands, equally fascinating. These books should be given to every child." — American Motherhood. This book is fully illustrated and annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer.

Emily Carr in this book talks about her challenging days as a landlady with the parade of tenants causing distractions on her passion as a painter. The Canadian painter and writer reiterate how the building she purchased for living in pursuit of her passion became a place where she cleaned up other people's mess. Filled with over 40 incredible stories that both the old and young will learn from.

First published in 1882, All Sorts and Conditions of Men chronicles daily life in the East-end district of Whitechapel road, where people go about their business with an air of quiet resignation. The arrival of Miss Kennedy, who wants to establish a dressmakers' co-operative, causes great excitement, especially when it transpires she is a friend of Angela Messenger, heiress to a local brewing fortune. Meanwhile, Harry Goslet learns his is not an aristocrat but the son of a lowly army sergeant. Determined to return to his true roots, he moves to the East End, where he ends up in the same boarding house as Miss Kennedy. The two discover a mutual interest in social reform, imagining a People's Palace of delight where the working classes can enjoy recreational activities as a reward for their labours. Nothing is quite what it seems in this magical microcosm, and soon their dreams are realised in the shape of a shimmering edifice that transforms the local community. This edition includes: a critical introduction, explanatory footnotes, suggestions for further reading, and extensive contextual material.

** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023** ** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023** 'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work' A.L. KENNEDY Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she – our missing contemporary?' In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield’s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.’ ‘What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity... Brilliant’ Sunday Times ‘A searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand’ Sunjeev Sahota

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, G. M. Hamburg shows why Russia’s enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev.

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.