Designed for people who want to speak basic Greek immediately or who have tried other courses without success, this course uses a carefully structured method that targets only the most important vocabulary and grammar to get you speaking straight away. The special learning programme takes only 45 minutes a day for six weeks and has fewer than 500 words for you to learn.

Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay.

A portrayal of genius possessed, through the biography of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, narrated by his friend Zeitblom in the years 1943-45, as Germany faces ruin.

Famous for his novels, Thomas Mann is more accessible through the shorter fictions which span his entire career. The most famous of these stories is one of the earliest. Death in Venice was made into the celebrated Visconti film, but all his mature preoccupations are present in this story: the need for a sense of meaning in existence, the relationship between life and art, the central role of sexual energy and the strange forms it can take, the place of death and disease, the importance of work, the individual's complex relations with his society and the dominant culture. These themes are...

'Death in Venice' is the story of an ageing writer's obsession with a young boy. The man is so distracted by the boy that he fails to pay attention to rumours of disease spreading through the city. The six other stories in this collection include 'The Joker', 'Gladius Dei', 'Little Herr Friedemann' and 'The Road to the Churchyard'.

This story of a prosperous Hanseatic family and their gradual disintegration is also a portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the 19th century to a modern uncertainty.

This is the story of Adrian Leverkuhn, whose extraordinary career is charted, from his precocious childhood to his tragic death. His revelation of the horrifying price he had to pay for his achievement highlights Mann's vast theme: the discord between genius and sanity.

An extraordinary collection of stories from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the title story, one of Mann's most political, explores the rise of facism by way of a mysterious magician in a small Italian vollage.
In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Thomas Mann uses settings as diverse as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East to explore a theme which always preoccupied him: the two faces of things. Thus, in "A Man and His Dog" and "Disorder and Early Sorrow," small domestic tempests become symbolic of the discordant muddle of humanity. In "The...

This is a study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the 19th century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but goes beyond his own experience in its sweep.