Sassoons fame as a novelist & autobiographer & the success of his posthumously published Diaries " have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famous " War Poems" of 1919 which firmly established his reputation he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 & subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in " Sequences."" ...

This collection brings together the poems Ted Hughes wrote for children throughout his life. They are arranged by volume beginning with those for reading aloud to the very young progressing to the poems in Under the North Star" & " What is the Truth?" & ending with " Season Songs" which Hughes remarked was written within hearing of children. Raymond Briggs brings to the collection two hundred original drawings that capture the wit gentleness & humanity of these poems & make this a book any reader
- child & adult
- will return to again & again."

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Wilde glamorous & notorious more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown & intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years

Includes:: the haunting elegy to his young sister & the grieving lyric at the death of his father. The religious drama of his romance with Rome is captured here as well as its resolution in his renewed love of ancient Greece. He explores forbidden sexual desires pays homage to the great theatre stars & poets of his day observes cityscapes with impressionist intensity. His final masterpiece The Ballad of Reading Gaol tells the painful story of his own prison experience & calls for universal compassion. This edition of Wildes verse presents the full range of his achievement as a poet.

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This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Includes:: all the poems contained in the Definitive

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The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work from Hawk in the Rain to the bestselling Birthday Letters. It also

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William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth & he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan & neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men & women of ordinary thoughts sights & sounds & his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art. Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy & his wife Mary by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem ' The Prelude' was completed in 1805 but was not published until after his death & it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry. ...

The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories" introduced by the author contains the celebrated series about Ashenden a secret service agent in World War I. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland the stories are vignettes in which he dramatises both the romance & absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness & brutality. Accountable only to 'R' Ashenden travels all over the Continent on assignments which entangle him with such characters as the traitor Grantley Caypor the passionate Guilia Lazzari & the sinister 'hairless Mexican'." ...

This classic collection of stories moves from England France & Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It

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The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America & England & include some of Maughams most famous tales; Flotsam & Jetsam the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; The Man with the Scar & notably the opening story The Vessel of Wrath a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse & a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles & his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time & place. ...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays & those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'. Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov & O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire irony & the macabre in which the stupidities & hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection

Includes:: Sredni Vastor & The Unrest Cure. ' We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'

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