Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was one of the leading intellectual historians of the twentieth century and the founding president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His many books include The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, and The Roots of Romanticism (all Princeton). In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to life a wide range of prominent...

The Nobel Prize winner recounts the misery in which his family lived, taking the reader to his childhood in Azinhaga, Portugal, the village where he was born, and in Lisbon, where he moved when he was two. El autor laureado cuenta la miseria en la cual su familia vivía durante su niñez en Azinhaga, la aldea en donde nació, y en Lisboa, adonde la familia se mudó cuando él tenía dos años.

En Clanton, un pequeño pueblo de Mississippi, los delitos tienen distinto valor según la raza del culpable. Cuando Carl Lee Hailey mata a tiros a los rufianes que violaron a su hija de diez años, los habitantes de la zona -indignados al principio por la suerte de la pequeña, pero inmersos después en una espiral de violencia racista- pretenden llevarse por delante todo lo que obstruya su particular noción de justicia.--