Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

At one point in his moody, erotic, and barbarous romance of She, H. Rider Haggard puts into the mouth of his narrator, Horace L. Holly, the observation that her story sounded like some extraordinary invention of a speculative brain. That, precisely, is what She is: a really marvelously inventive story, combining an amazing variety of what should be utterly implausible ideas into a fabric that constantly feels like truth.

English society in the 1860s was on the brink of enormous change, and some of the biggest changes coming to birth in that time were tremendous changes in the status of women - changes affecting politics, economics, law, government, business, education, psychology, religion, and sexuality, and the list goes on. The changes John Stuart Mill foresaw in 1861 as he wrote The Subjection of Women were just beginning to surface in his own time and have not yet run their full course in ours.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In particular, the torture of Beatrice Cenci at the hands of the authorities of Rome is given in brutal and clinical detail, sparing nothing.In this, the second of the series, Dumas tells the frankly horrifying story of the tragic sons and daughers of Francesco Cenci.

In this, the 13th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, finds ample scope for his favorite approach. His subject is a well-documented historical figure: Ali Tepelini, most often known as Ali Pasha and known even in his own day as The Lion of Tepelen. Dumas presents us with an extraordinary character, a man of tremendous courage, unstoppable tenacity, matchless duplicity, extreme debauchery, disgusting cruelty, and amazing ingenuity.

First published in 1849, this essay argues that individuals have rights and duties in relation to their government. Motivated by his disgust over both slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau argued that individuals must not permit nor enable their government to act against their own consciences. This version of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

William Hazlitt is one of the foremost writers of the English language. His fame as a critic, essayist, and social commentator ranks with the likes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He considered his justly famous Life of Napoleon as his most important work. In this, the first volume of the work, William Hazlitt devotes the vast majority of the work to the vital historical background: Napoleon's family; the history of Corsica; where he grew up, as it affected him and his family; and, above all, the history of the French Revolution up to the siege of Toulon.

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his “Jeux d’Esprit”, and a group of poems written in homage to the great poets of Italy. Hebrew Melodies is a collection of lyrics Byron wrote to be set to music, as indeed they were, by a composer named Isaac Nathan.

When Lord Byron published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he woke up one moring to find himself famous. Not long after that, when the word of his separation from Lady Byron got out, he woke up one morning to find himself infamous. Ever since then, his name has been linked inextricably with great lyric poetry and great sexual scandal. Women found him irresistible; he found them irresistible, and the resulting fireworks flared through the skies of the English upper classes of the Regency with tremendous color and enormous noise.

The fundamental message of A Preface to Politics is that statesmanship cannot succeed if it focuses merely on the forms and mechanics of government and the technical development and administration of policy. Political leadership can be successful only if political leaders attune themselves to the human beings they lead, keeping themselves abreast of their wants and needs and the social and cultural movements among them. No political mechanism can function without intelligent, perceptive, and responsive people to make it work.

The Wood Beyond the World transports its hero, Walter the Golden, from the English village of Langton-on-Holm across the seas to a magical kingdom in a forest beyond the known world, ruled by the Mistress, an extraordinarly beautiful, complex, and sinister woman. There he meets the Maid, a woman captured, enslaved, and tortured by the Mistress, who has magical powers of her own.

For everyone who loves, who ever loved, who searches for love, who suffers from love, who rejoices in love, these poems are for you. Are you in love? Have you ever been in love? Do you wish you were in love? Or perhaps you wish you weren't in love? This set of 70 poems is for you. It ranges in time from the classical Greece to the voices of the early 20th century.

Imagine a boardinghouse in the days when the Civil War was still a decade in the future, in which an erudite, polished, witty, sophisticated, learned gentleman holds forth each day at breakfast, entertaining the boarders with fascinating talk: observations on people and nature, occasional flights of verse, remarks on current events, moralizations and philosophical thoughts, and anything else that comes to his mind.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the first of the series, Dumas tells the luridly sexy, amazingly violent, and strikingly amoral story of the three most famous members of the Borgia family - Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia, and above all Cesare.

Renowned experts delve into the stark reality of the Alien presence on Earth. Riveting case studies of Air Force and Naval Alien encounters, UFO crash retrievals, interactions with E.T.'s, suppressed Alien technology and more are explored suggesting a foreboding and spellbinding conclusion for the fate of Mankind.

In Merlin, Edwin Arlington Robinson delves into the minds and hearts of a gallery of characters from the story Camelot. He places the action at the moment when Guinevere and Lancelot have fled to Joyeux Gard, and Arthur, goaded on by Modred and Gawaine, is reluctantly preparing an army to make war on them. It is at this time that he needs the advice and support of his old mentor, Merlin, more than ever before in his reign and his life, but it is at just this crucial time that Merlin has found that the love of Vivian is more important to him than kings, knights, or Camelot itself.

This is Carl Sandburg's third book of poetry and his largest. It is also the most wide-ranging. The title, Smoke and Steel, suggests the steel industry he knew in Chicago, Gary and Pittsburg, but he writes about many other things as well. His over-arching theme seems to be human life as a struggle in adversity, a struggle for the mere necessities of life - food, clothing, shelter, work - and a struggle for the human soul, a struggle for love, charity, justice, equality.

Frederick Jackson Turner was the dean of American historians in his time. He originated, and he and his students popularized, the Frontier Hypothesis of American history: that the primary driving force in the development of American society and politics was the encounter with the frontier, conceived of as a vast area of essentially free land, a seemingly limitless resource available to all comers.

In The Man Against The Sky, Edwin Arlington Robinson presents us with a gallery of characters drawn from the streets, homes and gathering places of Tilbury Town, his fictional Northeastern dwelling place. A mysterious compelling stranger, a woman living on charity, a welcoming home - this and other portraits give us a compelling and perceptive view of the range of human character and feeling.

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do that either. Just listen to the man converse with you and enjoy his playful talk - that's why he wrote it, and that's what it's for.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald is one of our best-loved books of poetry - and for good reason. Cynical, self-deprecating, witty, mystical, in love with wine and beauty while aware of life and death, Omar's poems put many thoughts we have all had into words we can all enjoy.