Pak Land Net

The Good Soldier  was conceived by Ford Madox Ford as the summation of his career as an admired and influential Edwardian novelist, his "last book", and a middle-aged writer's traditional riposte to the literary Cubists,  Vorticists  and  Imagists  of the day. In fact, it far outlives those heady innovators and stands at the entrance to 20th-century fiction as a dark, spellbinding puzzle, a novel of perennially enthralling and mysterious depths whose influence lingers like gun-smoke after a shooting. The "good soldier" of the title is the retired Indian army veteran Captain Edward Ashburnham, who, with his wife Leonora, forms an apparently normal friendship with two Americans, John and Florence Dowell, at the German spa town of Nauheim, where, in August 1913, all four have gone for a cure. The apparent perfection of these two marriages quickly unravels. Dowell's steady unfolding of this "saddest story", in a series of flashbacks, exposes not ...

Zuleika Dobson  is a brilliant Edwardian satire on Oxford life by one of English literature's most glittering wits that now reads as something much darker and more compelling. Readers new to Max Beerbohm's masterpiece, which is subtitled  An Oxford Love Story , will find a diaphanous novel possessed of a delayed explosive charge that detonates today with surprising power. Zuleika, the granddaughter of the warden of Judas College , is a female sleight-of-hand magician, a "prestidigitator", renowned from New York to St Petersburg. She is also a femme fatale, a turn-of-the-century It girl and a minor celebrity. This fascinating young woman of extraordinary beauty arrives in Oxford, a privileged all-male academic society, and immediately devastates the student body, becoming first its icon and then its nemesis. Having fallen in love with Zuleika, the undergraduates, happy to die for what can never be theirs, plunge en masse into the Isis shouting "Zuleika" (t...

But which of his 50 novels to choose?  The Sleeper Awakes  (a far-sighted portrait of a world enslaved by money and machines)?  Love and Mr Lewisham  (the tale of a schoolteacher who becomes a socialist but subordinates politics to family life)?  Tono-Bungay  (a brilliant satire on advertising and the popular press)?  Kipps  (a Dickensian comedy about one ordinary man's struggle for self-improvement)? Wells's fans will have their favourites. But I have chosen  The History of Mr Polly , a novel from Wells's early middle age (he wrote it when he was 44), a delightful comedy of everyday Edwardian England that draws inspiration from its author's own life. Moreover, as Wells put it in the preface to "the Atlantic Edition" of 1924, "a small but influential group of critics maintain that  The History of Mr Polly  is the writer's best book". If he could not quite accept that, he said, he would still concede that "certainly it is his hap...

The Wind in the Willows , known to many readers through theatrical adaptations such as  Toad of Toad Hall , belongs to a select group of English classics whose characters (Rat, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad) and their catchphrases ("messing about in boats"; "poop, poop!") require no introduction. Endlessly recycled, in print, cartoon and cinema, the ideas and images of Kenneth Grahame's masterpiece recur in the most unlikely places. Chapter seven, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", is also the name of Pink Floyd's first album in 1967. A sentimental British favourite,  The Wind in the Willows  is a far more interesting book than its popular and often juvenile audience might suggest. First, it is the work of a writer who had known considerable success in the 1890s as a young contemporary of Oscar Wilde, and who was also an admired contributor to the literary quarterly  The Yellow Book . At that point, Grahame was employed by the Bank of England but, st...

Seventh , is both a book of its epoch – orchidaceous, eccentric and weirdly obsessive, some would say mad – as well as being, in DH Lawrence's summary, "the book of a man-demon". Rolfe (pronounced "roaf") was born in London in 1860, the son of a piano manufacturer. He grew up, a homosexual with paedophile instincts, in the hot-house cultural climate that nurtured many late-Victorian literary men, notably Oscar Wilde and the Aubrey Beardsley of  The Yellow Book , as well as Edwardians such as  HH Munro  ("Saki") and  Max Beerbohm . For 10 years, Rolfe was a provincial schoolmaster and would-be Roman Catholic priest. His conversion to Rome in 1886 proved abortive and frustrating. His awkward personality and angry tongue blighted his adult life and led to his dismissal from the priesthood not once but twice. Thereafter, he drifted into a hand-to-mouth career as journalist, painter and photographer. At the age of 40 he began to write seriously, livi...

As we approach another giant in this series – for some, the only American writer of greater significance than  Mark Twain  or  F Scott Fitzgerald  – I've chosen to skip James I and II, and settle on late James, the Old Pretender, and his masterpiece,  The Golden Bowl , a novel that takes its title from Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 ("Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern… then shall the dust return to the earth as it was…"). I've made this choice for three reasons . First, because it addresses James's essential theme, the meeting of two great cultures, English and American, and mixes it with the sinister menace of his middle period. Second, because the novel is so intensely (maddeningly, some would say) Jamesian, often hovering between the difficult and the incomprehensible. And finally, because his last novel places him where he belongs, at the very beginning of the...

The Call of the Wild,  a short adventure novel about a sled dog named Buck (a cross between a St Bernard and a Scotch collie) will be one of the strangest, and most strangely potent, narratives in this series. Its author was a one-off, too. Jack London was a maverick, macho young man, the son of an itinerant astrologer and a spiritualist mother. As a boy, he led a criminal life, specialising in the piracy of oysters in San Francisco Bay. As a writer, he blazed briefly, lived hard and dangerously, and died from drink and drugs aged just 40, having written more than 50 books in 20 years. London is the archetype of the American writer as primeval hero , the forerunner of  Hemingway ,  Dos Passos ,  Kerouac  and possibly  Hunter S Thompson . To  George Orwell , he was "an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been". A devotee of Kipling's  Jungle Book , London found his literary voice writing about a dog that learns to live at t...