Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, Dom Quixote: great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. Anthony O'Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as dark, powerful, erotic, thrilling, politically astute and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.
We begin with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After Greek Tragedy, Plato, and Virgil's Aeneid comes Ovid, whose encyclopaedic Metamorphoses is an inexhaustible source for European art and literature. Via St Augustine we reach Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, a sublime, terrifying tour through Hell, Purgatory and an ecstatic vision of Paradise. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, ... more

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ABACUS COMMENT:

Almost the antithesis of Twitterature. Not a substitute for reading the classics, more a companion volume. May encourage readers to try the originals.