Edward Petherbridge

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster's first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread, the title is drawn from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process. Following the death of her husband, a widow named...

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleons war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoys view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoys philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.

In this, the second of Sayers's famous Harriet Vane mystery series, Harriet Vane the mystery writer, cleared of murder through the efforts of Lord Peter Wimsey, seeks solace in the country. Walking along a barren beach she stumbles across the body of a bearded young man with his throat cut. From the moment she photographs the corpse, which soon disappears with the tide, she is puzzled by a mystery that might have been suicide, murder or a political...

The third installment of Dorothy L. Sayers's famous Harriet Vane mysteries, unfolds at the all-female Shrewsbury College at Oxford. Upon returning to Oxford for the first time in years for a school reunion, Harriet Vane is asked by her old professors to turn her talents as a detective writer to practical use. Someone is terrorizing the faculty and students of the college by sending vicious anonymous letters, eventually leading to the destruction of...