Showing 929–944 of 955 resultsSorted by popularity
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€5.00
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography.
This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, Tristram Shandy provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne ‘the most liberated spirit of all time’.
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The gentle melancholy and lyrical atmosphere of Twelfth Night have long made the play a favourite with Shakespearian audiences. The plot revolves around mistaken identities and unrequited love, but is further enlivened by a comic sub-plot of considerable accomplishment. In it, Sir Toby Belch and his companion outwit the pretentious Malvolio, who despite suffering their most outrageous and insulting practical jokes, emerges as an almost noble figure.
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€19.95
Tony Ward’s story is a tragedy of a sporting career unfulfilled. Hailed by the Irish media as the new George Best of rugby following his pivotal performance in Munster’s stunning 12-0 win over the mighty touring All-Blacks – which in itself is one of the all-time greatest Irish sporting successes – Ward became a giant of Irish sport. His surge to fame portrayed him as Ireland’s next glamour boy; twelve feet tall and adored by the public.
But this dazzling beginning culminating in winning his first international cap for Ireland, would then be subsequently blighted by internal feuds with the powers that be in the IRFU and lasted right up until his retirement. Now, for the first time, Ward reveals in depth (including official correspondence with the IRFU) the shocking events that took place. The nature of the game at the time allowed certain elements within the ruling body to have a negative impact upon his burgeoning career.
A career which ended with just nineteen caps but which rugby people across the world admitted should have been far in excess of that. His beautiful articulacy and insights, which have made him one of the foremost journalists writing about rugby today, also come to the fore in this riveting memoir of his career. But it is his revelations which will leave you shaking your head and wondering just how this could have happened.
In telling his story fully for the first time, Tony Ward dearly hopes that his experience will serve as a warning to all sporting authorities everywhere that the natural skill, talent and potential of developing young sports stars will never again be mismanaged or confidence submerged in such a callous and uncaring way. This is his story.
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Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant, Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, begin an extremely hazardous voyage to rid the seas of a little-known and terrifying sea monster. However, the ‘monster’ turns out to be the giant submarine, Nautilus, commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo, by whom they are soon held captive. So begins not only one of the great adventure classics by Jules Verne, the ‘Father of Science Fiction’, but also a truly fantastic voyage from the lost city of Atlantis to the South Pole.
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€6.50
The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche’s last lucid months, show him at his moststimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Ubermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate, forcing the reader to face unpalatable insights and to rethink every commonly accepted ‘truth’. Thinking with Nietzsche, in Jaspers’ words, means holding one’s own against him, and we are indeed refreshed and challenged by the vortex of his thoughts, by concepts which test and probe. In The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes at breakneck speed of his provenance, his adversaries and his hopes for mankind; the books are largely epigrammatic and aphoristic, allowing this poet-philosopher to bewilder and fascinate us with their strangeness and their daring.
He who fights with monsters, Nietzsche once told us, should look to it that he himself does not become one, and when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Reader, beware.
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€12.50
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.
A masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest writers, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe’s rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only ‘repentance, justice and mercy’ will prevent the onset of ‘the wrath of Almighty God!’.
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This novel is based on the author’s personal experience as a teacher in Brussels. It is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude. It is also the story of a woman’s right to love and be loved.
Wordsworth Classics
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Charles Darwin’s travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world’s beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences’. Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea Islands, Darwin’s descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome.
In addition, The Voyage of the Beagle displays Darwin’s powerful, speculative mind at work, posing searching questions about the complex relation between the Earth’s structure, animal forms, anthropology and the origins of life itself.
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War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon’s war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy’s view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy’s philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.
This translation is one which received Tolstoy’s approval.
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€6.95
ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI
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€19.95
Hillary Clinton
The Sunday Times Bestseller`It is a compelling read’ – The Financial Times. `a sporadically absorbing, pleasingly vengeful and often darkly funny account of one woman’s bid for presidential history.’ The Sunday Times, `Her new book is more gossipy, it is meaner, more entertaining and more wrong-headed than anything she or her speechwriters have written before.’ The Observer `What Happened is highly entertaining. It is spirited, well-written and informative.’ The Guardian’In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net.
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Gallery Press
Sara Berkeley Tolchin?s new collection begins: ?I?d like my heart /to be without conditions, / to crack each day a little more open?, an ambition these vibrant, airy poems explore in the book?s copious reach. It reflects on themes of loss and losing: ?My mother is missing. The stars too, / the stars are not where I left them, / they are not in their constellations.?
As Wes Davis observed, in his Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ?her rich poems ? and her sharp eye for details of the natural world ? are given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country?. What Just Happened includes poems set on the west coasts of Ireland and the United States. But ?the rumble beneath her poetic language? (Davis continues) ?is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships?.
