Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. This edition is based on the Third Edition of 1857, revised by Gaskell and collated with the manuscript and the previous two editions, as well as with Charlotte Bronte's letters, offering fuller information about the process of composition than any previous edition.

The poems have been rendered into vigorous contemporary English. A selection of Michelangelo's letters, many of them to important contemporaries such as Vasari and Duke Cosimo, is accompanied by the 'Life' of the great artist written by his pupil Ascanio Condivi.

The Lifted Veil (1859) is now one of the most widely read and critically discussed of Eliot's works.

Bob Dylan's frequent changes have led to a dizzying accumulation of masks. In this psychobiography, Andrew McCarron looks across the surfaces of these masks and reveals a life characterized by more coherence than fragmentation. At the heart of this coherence is a repetitive story of spiritual death and rebirth.

In this Very Short Introduction Ian Walmsley introduces the physics of light. Beginning with the earliest conceptions of the nature of light he traces the growth of our understanding, through competing particle and wave theories to wave-particle duality and quantum theory, and the latest exciting applications such as optoelectronics.

This is a survey of the American past from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. The author assesses not only the epic achievements of the nation, but also the tensions and limitations of the society behind the American dream. A new chapter reviews recent presidential elections.

Covers the major aspects of linguistics. This guide begins at the 'arts' end of the subject and finishes at the 'science' end, with the discoveries regarding language in the brain. It looks at the prehistory of languages and their common origins, language and evolution, language in time and space, grammar and dictionaries and phonetics.