This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1905 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family - Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times - and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the "Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great" - men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle - exerted on him. In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer's editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century's greatest literary editors. Ford's most famous work was his Parade's End tetralogy, which he completed in the 1920's and have now been adapted into a BBC television drama. Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.

This insightful, evocative, and sumptuous volume brings Charles Booth's landmark survey of late nineteenth-century London to a new audience.

Ford's evocation of the growth of London, of the bewildering variety of the city scene by day and night, of the glamour and frivolity of its 'high' life and the hardship of its working people is a work of imaginative literature, not a guide book. Other writers had explored the 'facts' of London, but for Ford impressions take the place of information and argument. Part history, part personal reminiscence, and part prose poem which renders 'the moods of many individuals' in relation to the urban landscape, The Soul of London reads at times like fiction where the scene is set for characters who never appear. But it is also a journey of discovery into the nature of modern city life and our ways of coming to terms with it.

London has for most of 2000 years been the hub of the political, economic, and cultural life of the British Isles. No other city has held such a dominant national position for so long. This new study, by the doyen of London historians, describes London's diverse past, from its origins as aRoman settlement at the first bridging of the Thames to the world-class metropolis it is today. It provides a vivid account of a city which was the 'deere sweete' place which Chaucer loved more than any other city on earth, which was for Dickens his 'magic lantern', and to Keats 'a great sea',howling for more wrecks. It is also a story of much contrast and remarkable resilience; through great fires and pestilence, civil war, and the Blitz, London has rebuilt and reinvented itself for each generation.