Jane Austen, WB Yeats, Chesterton, Shaw... these are personal and intelligent short essays on a selection of great (and great-ish) writers: some well known, and some a bit more obscure to the average reader today. Robert Lynd (1879 – 1949) is best known as a literary essayist and Irish nationalist. He published many essays, all written in an easy, conversational style. Lynd was an essayist after the manner of Charles Lamb, and deserves to be better known. A complete list of his works is available at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wilson_Lynd

Witty spy adventure set during the Boer Wars of the late 19th Century.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, also the author of Undine, was a German Romantic writer whose stories were filled with knights, damsels in distress, evil enchantments, and the struggle of good against overpowering evil. 'My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.' Fouque blends the Romantic love for nature and ancient chivalry while telling a powerful story about a young man who yearns for that which he can never attain.

Guy Newell Boothby (1867 – 1905) was a prolific Australian writer. He moved to London in 1894 and became most well-known for his Dr.Nikola mysteries. This book is the first in a series of five and introduces the good doctor himself. Dr Nikola Is a criminal mastermind with an occult twist and like much fiction of that era this book and the following are more about how others fall under his spell and into his web. Here we have an adventure and love story that sweeps us from Australia, the South Seas, the Middle East and rural Hampshire with our lovestruck hero constantly battling against Dr Nikola and his cohorts...

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems. She helped create her own gardens in Sissinghurst, Kent, which provide the backdrop to Sissinghurst Castle. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf. Poems of West and East is a short collection of her early work, which was published in 1917. (Summary by Wikipedia and Elizabeth Klett)