The Times Top Ten BestsellerA Granta Best of Young British Novelist'Trainspotting for a new generation' - Independent'An instant Scottish classic' - The Skinny2005.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), more commonly known under the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, lecturer, publisher and entrepreneur most famous for his novels "e;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"e; (1876) and "e;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"e; (1884).
First published in 1858, "e;The Courtship of Miles Standish"e; is a narrative poem written by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the 'Mayflower', an English ship that transported early Pilgrims to the New World in 1620.
During Christine's childhood, which is described retrospectively in the early chapters of the book, her father tells her many stories featuring an 'Angel of Music', who, like a muse, is the personification of musical inspiration.
Beautiful Joe was a dog from the town of Meaford, Ontario, whose story inspired the bestselling 1893 novel Beautiful Joe, which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty.
In Henty''s words, "The Great War between the Northern and Southern States of America possesses a peculiar interest for us, not only because it was a struggle between two sections of a people akin to us in race and language, but because of the heroic courage with which the weaker party, with ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-equipped regiments, for four years sustained the contest with the adversary.
François-Marie Arouet wrote under the nom de plume of Voltaire, and produced works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.
If ever the story of any private man''s adventures in the world were worth making public, and were acceptable when published, the Editor of this account thinks this will be so.
Ships at anchor reared their tall masts, here and there; and the broad stream was enlivened and colored by junks and boats of all sizes and vivid hues, propelled on the screw principle by a great scull at the stern, with projecting handles for the crew to work; and at times a gorgeous mandarin boat, with two great glaring eyes set in the bows, came flying, rowed with forty paddles by an armed crew, whose shields hung on the gunwale and flashed fire in the sunbeams; the mandarin, in conical and buttoned hat, sitting on the top of his cabin calmly smoking Paradise, alias opium, while his gong boomed and his boat flew fourteen miles an hour, and all things scuttled out of his celestial way.
The third rebellion of Johannes Crescentius, Senator of Rome, enacted after the death of the pontiff and the election of Sylvester II, forms but the prelude to the great drama whose final curtain was to fall upon the doom of the third Otto, of whose love for Stephania, the beautiful wife of Crescentius, innumerable legends are told in the old monkish chronicles and whose tragic death caused a lament to go throughout the world of the Millennium.
