Everyman's Library CLASSICS

The first three volumes of Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL (the western empire) were published by Everyman in 1993. Volumes 4-6 complete the set which is now available for the first time in many years. This year is the bicentenary of Gibbon's death, which has been widely noticed in the press, but even after two hundred years his book is still an authoritative work on Roman history. What is more, it remains wonderfully readable: witty, elegant and intriguing, full of the author's own personality. The six-volume Everyman edition - the only complete one now available-prints the entire text of the book with all Gibbon's own notes, later editorial commentaries, maps, tables, descriptive tables of contents, indices, appendices and two magisterial essays on the author and his work by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

This volume contains two of the world's great love stories - FIRST LOVE, and SPRING TORRENTS, which show Turgenev at his very best. Simple, direct and tender, they record the pains and glories of youthful infatuation in a style which evokes exactly and in detail what it is like to be young and in love. In addition, there is a third, much shorter story, A FIRE AT SEA, translated by Isaiah Berlin, and an introduction to the whole volume by V. S. Pritchett.

The Everyman Signet Shakespeare series continues with the second volume of Histories, containing HENRY IV, parts I and II, HENRY V and HENRY VIII. As before, there is an extended introduction by Tony Tanner, a bibliography and author chronology. The plays are lightly annotated and the text is therefore ideal for both students and general readers.

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies. The Everyman edition is being published to tie in with a major BBC TV serialization in the autumn.

Ancient Athens produced three great tragic writers - Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Of the three Sophocles has in many ways remained the most accessible and may have had the most extensive influence on Western Culture, not least because Freud took from the Theban Plays the name and the idea of the Oedipus complex. Of Sophocles' hundred odd plays only seven have survived, of which three are printed here. The Theban Plays make up a trilogy as was common at the time, in which the story of Oedipus' downfall and its aftermath is explored in three stages.

One of Dicken's great middle period novels, in which fairy tale, melodrama and realism mingle with halluncinatory power, DOMBEY AND SON weaves together a number of stories which centre upon the family of the self-important merchant, Paul Dombey, and his children Paul and Florence. Supplied with the usual extraordinary cast of Dickensian grotesques, both comic and sinister, the novel also boasts a wonderful villain, in the person of Mr Carker, who tries to seduce Florence and meets his death under a train - the first such death in literary history.

Tom Paine is celebrated for the part he played in both the American and French Revolutions. Though an Englishman by birth, he reacted violently against the political order of eighteenth-century England and in favour of radical reform. So well thought of was he outside Great Britain that he became a distinguished public figure in both France and the United States. RIGHTS OF MAN and COMMON SENSE are the two short books in which he elaborates his political and social theories in vivid, simple prose which can still be read with pleasure and excitement today. These are among the foundling texts of the radical tradition in America and Western Europe.

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.

The Everyman Complete Shakespeare will publish the History plays in two volumes. In volume I are contained Shakespeare's first five history plays: HENRY VI parts I, II and II; RICHARD III and KING JOHN. The text of the plays is accompainied by extensive notes, author chronology, bibliography and a detailed introduction to each play and to Shakespeare's history plays in general by Tony Tanner.

Published in 1848, MARY BARTON was the first novel of Elizabeth Gaskell, later to become celebrated as the author of CRANFORD, MARY BARTON - a better book than CRANFORD - was written after she has married a Manchester clergyman, and it combines a typically sturdy romantic plot with striking descriptions of working people and their lives as she had encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has all this author's well-known charm and considerable power to involve the reader in the lives of her characters. More accessible than George Eliot, less frenzied than Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell is a novelist whose wit, human warmth and sharp eye for detail bring ordinary experience to vivid life.

Rabelais's hilarious, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life amonth the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic. A great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also enspouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The book is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.

In what remains after more than a century the greatest study of American political life, Tocqueville describes American society and accounts for its nature and its conflicts in an historical analysis of the nation's origins among different parties of European settlers. Brilliantly written and vividly illustrated with vignettes and portraits, this is also more than an exploration of one society at one time. Tocqueville's assessment of America is as relevant as it ever was, and his explanation of how democratic societies work can illuminate our own nation now.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE continues the Barchester series of novels in which Trollope explores the social, political and domestic life revolving around a mid-nineteenth-century cathedral town. Popular since it was first published, the story combines romantic comedy with satirical commentary.

In his last completed novel, published in 1864-5, Dicens confirmed his reputation as a story-teller of genius while extending the sphere of his imagination to new worlds. Like all Dickens' novels, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND weaves together many stories, uniting them in the bizarre symbolism of the wealth which derives from a rubbish tip. With all the energy of his earlier novels, this one has an extra resonance and depth of shade.

A brilliant short novel based on Tolstoy's early life as a soldier in the Caucusus, THE COSSACKS has all the energy and poetry of youth while at the same time foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy's later years. A young officer finds himself living among tribesmen on the borders of southern Russia. In depicting his experience, Tolstoy explores the birth and death of love, the transience of life, the love of honour and the pain of war, all portrayed amidst the wild and magnificent landscape of the mountains and described in exquisite detail.

Now recognized as one of the nineteenth century's leading psychologists and philosophers. Kierkegaard was among other things the harbinger of exisentialisim. In FEAR AND TREMBLING he explores the psychology of religion, addressing the question 'What is Faith?' in terms of the emotional and psychological relationship between the individual and God. But this difficult question is addressed in the most vivid terms, as Kierkegaard explores different ways of interpreting the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac to make his point.