Phil Benson
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods
A limbless reptilian monster that propels itself through the swamps with a propellor-tipped tail? A creature so ashamed of its monstrous app…
Short Stories (Household Words, 1854-58)
Elizabeth Gaskell published 18 short works in Charles Dickens' Household Words between 1850 and 1858. This collection follows the Librivox c…
Songs of a Sourdough
Reputedly the best-selling poetry collection of the 20th century, 'Songs of a Sourdough' is best known for Robert W. Service's classic Yukon…
Froth
Clementina is losing her youth in the fashionable world of late-nineteenth century Madrid and takes a younger lover. Meanwhile her father, t…
Forty Seasons of First-Class Cricket
R. G. "Dick" Barlow was one of the most accomplished all-round cricketers of the late 19th Century. For many years he opened the b…
The Story of Peterloo
On 16th August 1819 around 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to rally for parliamentary reform. Shortly after the me…
Wild and romantic: Early guides to the English lake district
A collection of some of the most significant literary work on the English Lake District prior to Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). …
BLAST No. 1
BLAST, edited by Wyndham Lewis and subtitled 'Review of the Great British Vortex', was the magazine of the short-lived Vorticist movement in…
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair
A prose romance set in the forested kingdom of Oakenrealm, where a squirrel can go about from end to end without touching the ground, in whi…
Two Cumberland Ballads
Two narrative ballads, based on local lore, by the Cumberland poet John Stagg. In 'The Hermit of Rockcliffe', a young fugitive takes refuge …
The Masque of Anarchy
The Masque of Anarchy was Shelley's response to the Peterloo massacre at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, where 18 died and hundreds were inju…
Orlando, A Biography (version 3)
Virginia Woolf's most successful novel recounts the extraordinary biography of Orlando from his youth in the reign of Elizabeth I to her lif…
Cycling in the Alps
A guide to cycling in the European Alps in the days before surfaced roads and automobile tourism. As the author explains, the spectacular vi…
Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History
The history of Britain up to the Norman Conquest in the form of 100 prose commentaries, each followed by a sonnet. The commentaries set the …
'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf: Contemporary Reviews (1927)
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in May 1927 in both Britain and the United States. The publication of Mrs. Dalloway a year …
Sydney Past and Present
An account of the early history of Sydney, Australia's first colonial city. Best known for his collection of light-hearted yarns, Steve Brow…
Kamakura
'Kamakura is nothing if she has no history, writes Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist Yone Noguchi. At the turn of the 20th century, Kama…
The Blue Review, Number 3
The Blue Review was a short lived monthly journal published in London between May and July 1913. The successor to Rhythm, The Blue Review wa…
Six lyrics from the Ruthenian of Taras Shevchenko, also The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov from the Russian of Mikhaíl Lermontov
Poetry by two radical poets, born in the same year, who suffered exile and punishment under the Tsarist Russian empire. Taras Shevchenko is …
Dionysius the Areopagite, with other poems
An early figure in the birth of poetry in industrial Manchester, Ann Hawkshaw published three collections and another was circulated private…