Some Penguin Classics prove a few of my Rules About Authors (not to be confused with my Rules For Authors, a very different though equally long list) rather handily, as in the case of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s rip-snorting 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast, issued as a Penguin in their American Library in [...]

  Some Penguin Classics are eerily prescient, sometimes in decidedly unpleasant ways. In 2013 we’re resolutely gearing up for the 2014 centennial of the opening of the First World War, gearing up for a probable onslaught of books, documentaries, and commemorative magazines designed to remember/reassess/cash in on one of the gruesome formative events of the [...]

  Some Penguin Classics – in fact, perhaps a good deal more than we like to tell ourselves – enshrine books that aren’t really ‘classics’ at all, or ought not to be. This problem – if you view it as a problem, which I tend to – has been hugely exacerbated in the last twenty [...]

Some Penguin Classics, no matter how brilliantly executed, can’t help but represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and surely in both those respects – brilliant execution and tantalizing lost worlds – few Penguin Classics can beat the 1977 paperback of Robert Fagles’ great 1966 translation of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The translation is a [...]