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Confessions, volumes 3 and 4

Read by Martin Geeson


Jean-Jacques Rousseau


“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.” Here again i…

The Story of My Misfortunes (or: Historia Calamitatum)

Read by Martin Geeson


Pierre Abélard


Autobiographies from remote historical periods can be especially fascinating. Modes of self-presentation vary greatly across the centuries, …

Zastrozzi, A Romance

Read by Martin Geeson


Percy Bysshe Shelley


“Would Julia of Strobazzo’s heart was reeking on my dagger!” From the asthmatic urgency of its opening abduction scene to the Satanic defia…

The Trespasser

Read by Martin Geeson


D. H. Lawrence


Brief Encounter meets Tristan und Isolde - on the Isle of Wight, under a vast sky florid with stars. The consequence is tragic indeed for on…

The Diary of a Superfluous Man

Read by Martin Geeson


Ivan Turgenev


Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype - the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet no…

Confessions, volumes 5 and 6

Read by Martin Geeson


Jean-Jacques Rousseau


"She was more to me than a sister, a mother, a friend, or even than a mistress, and for this very reason she was not a mistress; in a w…

Samson Agonistes

Read by Martin Geeson


John Milton


“The Sun to me is darkAnd silent as the Moon,When she deserts the nightHid in her vacant interlunar cave.”Milton composes his last extended …

Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

Read by Martin Geeson


Robert Louis Stevenson


“Extreme busyness…is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal …

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Read by Martin Geeson


Honoré de Balzac


Listeners who like to plunge straight into a story would do well to skip the lengthy preamble. Here, Balzac the virtuoso satirist depicts th…

The Idiot (Part 01 and 02)

Read by Martin Geeson


Fyodor Dostoyevsky


The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Ru…

Confessions, volumes 1 and 2

Read by Martin Geeson


Jean-Jacques Rousseau


“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.” Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most …

First Love

Read by Martin Geeson


Ivan Turgenev


The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, …

An Essay on Man

Read by Martin Geeson


Alexander Pope


Pope’s Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind’s place in th…

The Mabinogion, Volume 1

Read by Martin Geeson


Anonymoustranslated Bycharlotte Guest


Sample a moment of magic realism from the Red Book of Hergest:On one side of the river he saw a flock of white sheep, and on the other a flo…

A Problem in Modern Ethics

Read by Martin Geeson


John Addington Symonds


“Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed.”…

Bel Ami, or The History of a Scoundrel

Read by Martin Geeson


Guy de Maupassant


“He had faith in his good fortune, in that power of attraction which he felt within him - a power so irresistible that all women yielded to …

Phaedrus

Read by Martin Geeson


Plato


“For there is no light of justice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them: they…

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Read by Martin Geeson


Samuel Johnson


In this enchanting fable (subtitled The Choice of Life), Rasselas and his retinue burrow their way out of the totalitarian paradise of the H…

Farewell

Read by Martin Geeson


Honoré de Balzac


In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Read by Martin Geeson


Thomas De Quincey


“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memori…

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