Classic Books

“The Grand Inquisitor” is a poem in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. It is recited by Ivan, who questions the possibility of a personal and benevolent God, to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk.

If you take a pie and cut it in two, the track of your knife will represent the course of Mud River through the town of Gloning, and that part of the pie to the left of your knife will be the East Side, while the part to the right will be the West Side. Away out on the edge of the pie, where the town fritters away into the fields and shanties on the East Side, dwells Mrs. Deacon, and a fatter, better-natured creature never trod the crust of the earth or made the crust of a pie. Being in reduced circumstances, owing to the inability of Mr. Deacon to appreciate the beneficial effects of work, Mrs. Deacon turned her famous baking ability to account, and in a small way began selling her excellent homemade pies to those who liked a superior article. In time Mrs. Deacon established a considerable trade among the people of Gloning, and Mr. Deacon was wrested from his customary seat on the back steps to make daily delivery trips with the Deacon home-made pies.

The Great Boer War’ is a non-fiction work on the Boer War by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in the year 1900. By the end of the war in 1902, the book had been published in 16 editions, constantly revised by Doyle.

The present book ‘The Great Impersonation’ is a mystery novel written by famous author Edward Phillips Oppenheim. It was first published in the year 1920. German Leopold von Ragastein meets his doppelganger, Englishman Everard Dominey, in Africa, and plans to murder him and steal his identity in order to spy on English high society just prior to World War I. However, doubts of the returned Dominey’s true identity begin to arise in this tale of romance, political intrigue, and a haunting past.

If you would like to know the story of the Great Invasion of 1814, just as it was told me by the old huntsman, Frantz du Hengst, you must come with me to the village of Charmes, in that province of France called the Vosges. About thirty little houses, with stuccoed fronts, and their roofs covered with dark green moss, are dotted along the borders of the Sarre; you can see their gables round which the ivy creeps and the honeysuckle twines—the honeysuckle withered now, for winter is near—the beehives closed with wisps of straw, the little gardens, the wooden palings, the hedge-rows that divide them from each other.

A maid opened the door leading from a bedroom to a salon of the “royal suite” at Harridge’s Hotel. Dusk had fallen, and entering, she switched on the electricity. The room, with its almost Louis Seize decorations, was suddenly flooded with light; and to her surprise the Frenchwoman saw a slim black figure nestled deep among cushions on a sofa before the fire. A small white face, with a frame of terra-cotta hair crushed under a mourning toque, turned a pair of big black eyes upon her.

One morning early in the summer of 1826, I brushed the sweat from my forehead and the flour from my clothes, unrolled my shirt-sleeves to my wrists, donned my coat, and, with never a suspicion that that day was to be unlike any other, calmly walked out into the slanting sunshine. Rain had fallen in the night, and the air was still fresh and cool. Although the clock had but just struck six, I had been at work an hour, and now that my uncle, Seth Upham, had come down to take charge of the store, I was glad that some business discussed the evening before gave me an excuse to go on an errand to the other end of the village.

The Great Shadow and other Napoleonic Tales’ is an action and adventure novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in the year 1892. The novel takes place in the Napoleonic era on the English-Scottish border city called West Inch. The Great Shadow refers to the Napoleon’s influence and his reputation that forms a shadow over West Inch.

“Good evening, sir. A bit gusty?”

“Very much so, sergeant,” I replied. “I think I will step into your hut for a moment and light my pipe if I may.”

“Certainly, sir. Matches are too scarce nowadays to take risks with ’em. But it looks as if the storm had blown over.”

“I’m not sorry,” said I, entering the little hut like a sentry-box which stands at the entrance to this old village high street for accommodation of the officer on point duty at that spot. “I have a longish walk before me.”

The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport’ is a collection of 15 short stories by renowned British Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in the year 1900.

“I don’t know whether there’s a law that stops my doing this, Jim; but if there is, you’ve got to get round it. You’re a lawyer and you know the game. You’re my pal and the best pal I’ve had, Jim, and you’ll do it for me.”

The dying man looked up into the old eyes that were watching him with such compassion and read their acquiescence.

No greater difference could be imagined than existed between the man on the bed and the slim neat figure who sat by his side. John Millinborn, broad-shouldered, big-featured, a veritable giant in frame and even in his last days suggesting the enormous strength which had been his in his prime, had been an outdoor man, a man of large voice and large capable hands; James Kitson had been a student from his youth up and had spent his manhood in musty offices, stuffy courts, surrounded by crackling briefs and calf-bound law-books.

In this book I have sketched the principles of the mental life of groups and have made a rough attempt to apply these principles to the understanding of the life of nations.

The present book, ‘The Growth of a Crystal’ constitutes a lecture delivered by Henry A. Miers who was the Principal of London University. It was delivered on 20th May 1911 at the Eighteenth Robert Boyle Lecture before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club.

In his personal life, Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg placed great importance on personal development and progression, even if that process proved to be unbearably painful and disruptive. That value system is reflected throughout the novel ‘The Growth of a Soul’, a coming-of-age story in which the transition to a state of maturity and enlightenment extracts a significant cost.

The Old Village wasn’t large—three parallel roads, a mile long, lined with the charred ruins of prefabs, which were exactly like the cottages where the kids lived. It was nothing to inspire either fear or legend. The village had burned a long time ago; the grass from the forest had grown a green mantle over the skeletal walls.

A revised version of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust – a new edition of the classic text in six volumes. The book includes new material which has been incorporated in the French Pleiade edition, and which up to this time has not been available to the English reader.

First published in the year 1881, ‘The Gully of Bluemansdyke and Other stories’ is acollection of renowned British novelist and story writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery and adventure stories.

I could not say at which station the woman and her baby entered the train.
Since we had left London I had been engrossed in Henri Bergson’s “Time and Free Will,” as it is called in the English translation. I had been conscious of various stoppages and changes of passengers, but my attention had been held by Bergson’s argument. I agreed with his conclusion in advance, but I wished to master his reasoning.
I looked up when the woman entered my compartment, though I did not notice the name of the station. I caught sight of the baby she was carrying, and turned back to my book. I thought the child was a freak, an abnormality; and such things disgust me.
I returned to the study of my Bergson and read: “It is at the great and solemn crisis, decisive of our reputation with others, that we choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes.”

First published in the year 1876, ‘The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters’ was written by Thomas Hardy for the Cornhill Magazine. The author was associated with the magazine through his mentor and friend Lslie Stephen who was the editor to the prestigious magazine.

“Who’s there?” I called sharply.

I turned and looked across the room. The window had been widely opened when I entered, and a faint fog haze hung in the apartment, seeming to veil the light of the shaded lamp. I watched the closed door intently, expecting every moment to see the knob turn. But nothing happened.

“Who’s there?” I cried again, and, crossing the room, I threw open the door.

The long corridor without, lighted only by one inhospitable lamp at a remote end, showed choked and yellowed with this same fog so characteristic of London in November. But nothing moved to right nor left of me. The New Louvre Hotel was in some respects yet incomplete, and the long passage in which I stood, despite its marble facings, had no air of comfort or good cheer; palatial it was, but inhospitable.

First published in the year 1914, the present book ‘The Happy Golfer’ was written by Henry Leach. While giving varied descriptions of golf, this book has experiences and reflections by a golf player, Leach.

First published in the year 1896, the present book ‘The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men’ by Max Beerbohm is a short story with moral implications. It tells the story of a man who deceives a woman with a mask in order to marry her.

A collection of fiction short stories written by one of the foremost writers of English literature – Oscar Wilde, for children. These stories are fantasies that are gross and engaging for children to read and experience life in a beautiful way.

The Haunted Bookshop’ is the 1919 novel by Christopher Morley, now in the public domain in the United States. This is a suspenseful novel set in Brooklyn around the time of the end of World War I. It continues the story of Roger Mifflin, the book seller in Parnassus on Wheels. It also details an adventure of Miss Titania Chapman and a young advertising man named Aubrey Gilbert.

Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; “but that’s no rule,” as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did.

In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good.

“It was a bland, sunny morning of a mediæval May,—an old-style May of the most typical quality; and the Council of the little town of St. Radegonde were assembled, as was their wont at that hour, in the picturesque upper chamber of the Hôtel de Ville, for the dispatch of the usual municipal business. Though the date was early sixteenth century, 2the members of this particular town-council possessed considerable resemblance to those of similar assemblies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even the nineteenth centuries, in a general absence of any characteristic at all—unless a pervading hopeless insignificance can be considered as such.” -an excerpt

This little book has been compiled by special and repeated request. It is not addressed to the professional cook, but to those who find themselves confronted with the necessity of manufacturing economical vegetarian dishes without any previous experience of cooking.

A time when Russia’s movements in the East are being watched by all with such keen interest seems a fitting one for the appearance of a work dealing with her Central Asian possessions. “That eternal struggle between East and West,” to quote Sir William Hunter’s apt phrase, has made Russia supreme in Central Asia, as it has made England mistress of India: and thus it has come to pass that two of the greatest European Powers find themselves face to face on the Asiatic Continent. On the results of that contact depends the future of Asia.