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The Secret Agent
Taking as his inspiration the historical accidental death by explosion of an anarchist outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, Lond…
Don Quixote
It is a curious paradox that while the two volumes of Don Quixote have been described as the "best novel of all time" and the &quo…
Almayer's Folly
Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father's Polish nationalist political a…
Victory
After spending some years wandering about the East and engaging in various adventures, Axel Heyst, a man of independent means who feels litt…
'Twixt Land and Sea
While the central figures in each of the three stories in this collection are sailing captains, the main action in two of them takes place o…
The Nigger of the Narcissus
Today, we're likely to react to the title of this novella, on whose 'sincerity of expression' Conrad was willing to stake his artisitic repu…
Under Western Eyes
"But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings." Set in St Petersburg and Geneva, this a…
The French Revolution: A History
Of this third, and final, phase of the French Revolution, including that period known as The Terror, Carlyle comments "It is unfortunat…
The Rescue
"The Rescue" is the third of Conrad's novels to feature Captain Tom Lingard, an independent buccaneer operating in the Malayan arc…
A Personal Record
Conrad began dictating the series of loose autobiographical sketches that would become 'A Personal Record' in 1911, when he was half way thr…
Bliss
"(N)ot to say that they are cheerful stories; they are anything but that; they have not, however, that element of trivial discomfort so…
In a German Pension
Katherine Mansfield was only 22 years old when these stories were first published in book form. Mansfield was later reluctant to see them re…
Chance
"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness," the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who …
The Charterhouse of Parma
In an astounding act of literary improvisation, Stendhal dictated this complex and innovative novel, combining political and psychological r…
The Mirror of the Sea
"Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages,…
An Outcast of the Islands
This, Conrad's second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, 'Almayer's Folly', teasing out the origins of the factional ten…
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Such may be the reaction of many listeners to Thucydides' compelling and rightly celebr…
No More Parades
When No More Parades was first published in 1925, a critic in The Observer wrote of the first 100 pages that they "easily surpass in tr…
A Set of Six
Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In "Gaspar Ruiz", a South American…
A Man Could Stand Up
'A Man Could Stand Up' is the third, and culminating, part of Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End' tetralogy of novels, which begins with 'Some …