Penguin Little Black Classics review – affordable snippets of great literature

From Homer to Balzac to Darwin to Dickens, these Penguin 80th birthday booklets are where publishing meets public serviceIt was quite overwhelming, to open the box containing all 80 of these booklets – one for each year in the life of Penguin Books. Each is around 60 pages long; each is an extract from the Penguin Classics range. Where to start? In the end I just tipped them out and stuck out my hand at random. To my delight, I picked out Suetonius’s life of Caligula. You are never going to be bored by Suetonius, especially on Caligula. (Although it would perhaps have been more fitting, or certainly cuter, if my debased version of the Sortes Virgilianae – the ancient tradition of using the poet’s works for divination – had actually picked out Penguin’s snippet of Virgil.)As I was reading about the emperor’s vanity and excesses (“during the day he would indulge in whispered conversations with Jupiter Capitolinus” – a statue – “pressing his ear to the god’s mouth and sometimes raising his voice in anger”), I wondered who among us today is so puffed-up that they feel they can bend a venerable institution to their own will, making themselves a laughing-stock while doing so? Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-02-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Douglas Unger Turns Rapacious Greed and Moral Slipperiness into High Literature

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The Black List Upended the Film Industry. The Book World Is Next

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Majority of UK children’s books with Black main characters written by white authors, study finds

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Penguin Young Readers Expands 'Bluey' After License Renewal

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Black British Book festival founder criticises lack of diversity in publishing

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Penguin Random House Creates New Role to Help Battle Book Bans

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How ‘The Great When’ by Alan Moore Got Made

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‘I wanted to write a suburban Reacher’: Richard Osman talks to Lee Child about class, success and the secret to great crime writing

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