Phil Benson
Froth
Clementina is losing her youth in the fashionable world of late-nineteenth century Madrid and takes a younger lover. Meanwhile her father, t…
The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed
Cenydd Morus's (Kenneth Morris) imaginative retelling of tales from the Mabinogion, the great work of Welsh literature first recorded in the…
Forty Seasons of First-Class Cricket
R. G. "Dick" Barlow was one of the most accomplished all-round cricketers of the late 19th Century. For many years he opened the b…
Wild and romantic: Early guides to the English lake district
A collection of some of the most significant literary work on the English Lake District prior to Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). …
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods
A limbless reptilian monster that propels itself through the swamps with a propellor-tipped tail? A creature so ashamed of its monstrous app…
Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History
The history of Britain up to the Norman Conquest in the form of 100 prose commentaries, each followed by a sonnet. The commentaries set the …
The Manchester Man
Jabez Clegg, the Manchester man, floats into this historical novel in 1799, carried downstream by the River Irk in flood. Jabez's rise to co…
Short Stories (Household Words, 1854-58)
Elizabeth Gaskell published 18 short works in Charles Dickens' Household Words between 1850 and 1858. This collection follows the Librivox c…
Exeter
Exeter, county town of Devon, is one of England's most historic cities with remains of the Roman occupation and medieval times still on view…
Things Seen in Venice
Venice, once among the most powerful states of the Western world, now a much-visited but still romantic city of canals, architecture and art…
'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf: Contemporary Reviews (1927)
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published in May 1927 in both Britain and the United States. The publication of Mrs. Dalloway a year …
Beckside Lights
John Ackworth was the pen name of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist minister who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent much of his…
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair
A prose romance set in the forested kingdom of Oakenrealm, where a squirrel can go about from end to end without touching the ground, in whi…
Orlando, A Biography (version 3)
Virginia Woolf's most successful novel recounts the extraordinary biography of Orlando from his youth in the reign of Elizabeth I to her lif…
The Itinerary of John Leland in or About the Years 1535-1543
John Leland's 'Itinerary' was the product of several journeys around England and Wales undertaken between 1538 and 1543. The manuscript is m…
Six lyrics from the Ruthenian of Taras Shevchenko, also The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov from the Russian of Mikhaíl Lermontov
Poetry by two radical poets, born in the same year, who suffered exile and punishment under the Tsarist Russian empire. Taras Shevchenko is …
Sydney Past and Present
An account of the early history of Sydney, Australia's first colonial city. Best known for his collection of light-hearted yarns, Steve Brow…
The Cycle Industry, its origin, history and latest developments
From the velocipede to the motor cycle in twenty chapters. A short history of the British bicycle industry from its origins in a Coventry se…
The Story of Peterloo
On 16th August 1819 around 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to rally for parliamentary reform. Shortly after the me…
Dionysius the Areopagite, with other poems
An early figure in the birth of poetry in industrial Manchester, Ann Hawkshaw published three collections and another was circulated private…