This invaluable work provides a quick look into the lives of some of the unique thinkers and literary personalities of the 18th century. The writer brilliantly covered the events in the lives of these personages that somehow shaped the history of Great Britain and presented them in a simple language. Contents include: Eighteenth-Century Men About Town Some Exquisites of the Regency A Forgotten Satirist: "Peter Pindar" Sterne's Eliza The Demoniacs William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey Charles James Fox Philip, Duke of Wharton

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”

A collection of essays on 18th-century eccentrics first published together in book form in 1911, having previously appeared in various periodicals.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.