'Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin' On topics ranging from intelligent design and climate change to the politics of gender and race, the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin occupy a pivotal position in contemporary public debate.  Meer

The modern horror story grew and developed across the nineteenth century, embracing categories as diverse as ghost stories, the supernatural and psychological horror, medical and scientific horror, colonial horror, and tales of the uncanny and precognition.  Meer

'To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding.' Godwin's Political Justice is the founding text of philosophical anarchism.  Meer

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved.  Meer

'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne' James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories.  Meer

Love's Labour's Lost, now recognized as one of the most delightful and stageworthy of Shakespeare's comedies, came into its own both on the stage and in critical esteem only during the 1930s and 1940s, after three hundred years of neglect by the theatre and undervaluation and misuse by critics.  Meer

'I went & sat with W & walked backwards & forwards in the Orchard till dinner time - he read me his poem. I broiled Beefsteaks.' Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are a unique record of her life with her brother William, at the time when he was at the height of his poetic powers.  Meer

A classic study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, and the progress through magic and religion to scientific thought, The Golden Bough has a unique status in modern anthropology and literature.  Meer

'A countryman cleaves earth with his crooked plough. Such is the labour of his life. So he sustains his native land .  Meer

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection of her short fiction ever printed.  Meer