He died at the age of 25, but Keats was one of the great Romantic poets. His honeyed style hid deep emotions. The sensuous beauty of poems such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, The Eve of St Agnes & Ode to Autumn have always given me immense pleasure to read.

Is it about a father complex, capitalism, the way people treat those who are ill, anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of working people, or existential dread? Grotesquely humorous and painfully tragic, the story is not one that is easily forgotten.

Kafka’s weird story about a man who wakes up transformed into a giant insect is one that instantly captures the imagination, though opinions vary about what this may symbolise, if indeed the story is symbolic at all.

One of Tolstoy's grimmest stories, this disturbing and challenging novella is told from the viewpoint of a man who murdered his wife. Tolstoy offers a bitter dissection of the Russian aristocracy, the place of women in Russian society and the institution of marriage in such an environment.