The horrors of the First World War released a great outburst of emotional poetry from the soldiers who fought in it as well as many other giants of world literature. Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and W B Yeats are just some of the poets whose work is featured in this anthology. The raw emotion unleashed in these poems still has the power to move readers today. As well as poems detailing the miseries of war there are poems on themes of bravery, friendship and loyalty, and this collection shows how even in the depths of despair the human spirit can still triumph.

And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen’s papers in the British Museum and other archives.

There's a set of books which you're just supposed to know about, at least if you live in The West and fancy the idea of being thought 'educated'. There's the Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Walter Scott and Machiavelli. Dr Jekyll, Tiny Tim, Starbuck, Socrates, Mr. Scrooge, Raskolnikov, Einstein and Enkidu. The Brontes and Boswell, Wordsworth, Newton Confucius and Don Quixote. Here they all are. 100 of the most quoted, most known, works of all time, in the original author's own words, but squashed up into nice little abridgements you can read in an hour or so. Little versions which smell and sound just like the originals. And ... with The Hundred Books it becomes possible to read the whole thing as a single narrative, to discover a Pisgah View of the written history of the great grand thing of how We got where We are now, in way that's just impossible for ordinary mortals. Read the lot, you'll love it, and you'll never, ever, be bored in an airport again.