A book about Euripides? Yes, but it’s much more than that. Far from a dry academic study, this is one of the most riveting books you’ll ever read. With remarkable insight, Gilbert Murray traces the history of all our most important human ideas—democracy, patriotism, war, hate, forgiveness—and shows how Euripides filters them all through his towering genius. This is a book you’ll read again and again, a book you’ll quote to friends, a book you’ll keep with you for the rest of your life.

When this book was first published more than a century ago, the author wrote that “quite apart from his disputed greatness as a poet and thinker, apart from his amazing and perhaps unparalleled success as a practical playwright, Euripides is a figure of high significance in the history of humanity and of special interest to our own generation.”

That’s still true today. Yes, it’s a book about Euripides. But it’s also a book about everything it means to be human. Even if you have never read Euripides, or never liked him when you did read him, you will still probably enjoy this book. You may end up loving this book. Gilbert Murray had one of those great minds that can effortlessly find the universal in the particular, and here are just a few of the remarkable thoughts you’ll find here:


Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the resultant of two forces. He is first the child of a particular age, society, convention; of what we may call in one word a tradition. He is secondly, in one degree or another, a rebel against that tradition. And the best traditions make the best rebels. (Chapter 1.)

In every contest that goes on between Intelligence and Stupidity, between Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the powers of the dark have this immense advantage: they never understand their opponents, and conse­quently represent them as always wrong, always wicked, whereas the intelligent party generally makes an effort to understand the stupid and to sympathize with anything that is good or fine in their attitude. (Chapter 2.)

We must distinguish carefully between the two notions, Enlightenment and Democracy. They happen to have gone together in two or three of the greatest periods of human progress and we are apt to regard them as somehow necessarily allied. But they are not. (Chapter 5.)

Irony is the mood of one who has some strong emotion within but will not quite trust himself on the flood of it. And romance is largely the mood of one turning away from realities that disgust him. (Chapter 5.)

After all they were a democracy; and, as Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom, like the wicked man in Aristotle’s Ethics, “calmly sins.” (Chapter 5.)

Euripides and His Age at Amazon.com.

A ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing to squash the evidence against him. A beautiful woman with a mysterious secret. A doomed express train. A murdered man in a sleeping compartment. An amateur detective up on all the latest inductive methods. And a hero who looks for all the world like a murderer.

You can rely on these ingredients to produce first-rate entertainment, and you can rely on Mary Roberts Rinehart, the queen of American mystery writers, to make the best use of her ingredients.

The Man in Lower Ten at Amazon.com.

The Douay Bible was Bishop Challoner’s most famous work: he revised the stilted language of the 1600s original to produce the beautiful and mem­orable English version beloved by gene­ra­tions of Catholics.

Challoner applied the same genius for straight­forward dignity to his transla­tion of the most famous work of Christian litera­ture outside the Bible. In Challoner’s mem­orable prose, St. Augustine of Hippo comes alive on the page, speaking to us across the centuries.

For those who already know Augustine’s Confes­sions, here is a trans­la­tion that brings new life to a familiar text. For those who are en­coun­tering Augustine for the first time, this version is the ideal intro­duction to the most thoroughly self-examined per­sonality of ancient times.

Richard Challoner was an English Catholic bishop respected by Catholics and Protestants alike for his ability to seize on what was common to both faiths. His faithful and vigorous translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions was first published in 1739.

St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Challoner Translation, at Amazon.com.

Young gentleman, have you found a perfectly innocent young lady who seems like your ideal choice for a wife? Let Mrs. Haywood show you what really goes on in the little vixen’s head.

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela gave us a scrupulously virtuous heroine who would make any sacrifice to preserve her innocence. Mrs. Haywood gives us the exact opposite of Pamela.

Or is Pamela really so different from Anti-Pamela? What lies behind that façade of virtue? Enter the sordid world of the Anti-Pamela, and learn “the Mischiefs that frequently arise from a too sudden Admiration.”

This new edition is taken faithfully from the original edition of 1741, with a new introduction by H. Albertus Boli.

“This is a true Story, of a Man Gallant enough to merit your Protection; and, had be always been so Fortunate, he had not made so Inglorious an end: The Royal Slave I had the Honour to know in my Travels to the other World; and though I had none above me in that Country, yet I wanted power to preserve this Great Man. If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange. What I have mention’d I have taken care shou’d be Truth, let the Critical Reader judge as he pleases. ’Twill be no Commendation to the Book, to assure your Lordship I writ it in a few Hours, though it may serve to Excuse some of its Faults of Connexion; for I never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought.”

—From the Epistle Dedicatory

Famous wit, notorious libertine, mystery woman, spy, the ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn may also have been the first woman in history to make her living as a professional writer. Of all her works, this romantic tragedy of the enslaved African prince is the one best known today—a tale as mysterious as the woman who wrote it. Is it a novel? Is it a true story? Or is it, as H. Albertus Boli argues in his new introduction, a mixture of both?

Oroonoko; Or, the Royal Slave, at Amazon.com.