God's creations of man in a lyrical dramatization; Noah's cantankerous and hilariously funny wife refusing to leave without her friends; the Massacre of the Innocents

Miracle Plays were a popular form of entertainment throughout the Middle Ages, and part of the poetic and dramatic tradition on which Shakespeare drew.Everymandiscovers what you can't take with you when you go. He beseeches in turn friends, family (one pleads 'cramp in my toe'), possessions ('I follow no man in such voyages'), and finally falls back on moral and religious values.

The most comprehensive...

Horror stories, science fiction, detective stories and satirical sketches -the variety of Poe will chill and delight

Locked doors, sealed cavities, bricked-up alcoves and premature burial close in on Poe's narrators as they, like their victims, are cut off from light, air and human society. Partly, Poe's stories resonate as the disordered chambers' of the narrators' minds but also they suggest archetypal, if extreme psychological states.

yet Poe was an incurable hoaxer, and in telling some wonderful short stories he also told some excessively tall tales.

The...

The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher and precursor of Freud

The World as Will and Idea (1819) holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art, and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation. Unique in western philosophy for his affinity with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, writers, and composers including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett.

The Work presented here appeals not only to the...

This is a selection of poems from the successful BBC Radio 4 series of the same name, including works by Auden, Betjeman, Hopkins and MacNeice. The book contains both text and commentary.