Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Ge[...]

Proust's famous novel A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) is a fascinating exploration not only of memory and desire, of high society and everyday life, but also of art. The study focuses on Venice, one of the hero's central obsessions, and shows how a whole network of allusio[...]

"The Kennedys: An American Drama" is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall.[...]

This description is based on the MIT professor's writings on linguistics in the 1950s; but beginning with his criticism of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky became much better known for his radical politics than for his theories of language. Over the past forty years he has gained a devoted foll[...]