Tom Stoppard

Vienna in 1900 was the most vibrant city in Europe, humming with artistic and intellectual excitement and a genius for enjoying life. A tenth of the population were Jews. A generation earlier, they had been granted full civil rights by the Emperor, Franz Josef. Consequently, hundreds of thousands had fled from the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms in the...

With an introduction by the author, this is Tom Stoppard in the voice of Odysseus's wife recalling how the Trojan War 'took away my husband for ten years, and ten more coming the long way home', and his dramatic arrival back on Ithaca. Weaving Homeric tropes with the wry wit of a woman of our time, Penelope tells this still...

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon is an uproarious fantasy set in modern London. Tom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966, includes not only the eighteenth-century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, but also a couple of cowboys with six-shooters, a lion (banned from the Ritz) and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the risen Christ....

This play takes readers back and forth between the 19th and 20th centuries. Set in a large country house in Derbyshire, a cast of characters from each century play out their respective dramas. The text explores topics such as the nature of truth and time and the difference between the classical and the romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of...

The author rounds off his brief introduction, giving the genesis of each piece, with the comment: "The role of the theatre is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory". Leading off is The Real Inspector Hound, the ultimate country-house whodunnit; Dirty Linen moves a...

Indian Ink is Tom Stoppard's rich and moving meditation on art and love, set against one of the great shifts of history, as India regained its independence from the grip of the British Empire. If you don't start learning to take you'll never be shot of us. Nothing else counts. It's your country, and we've got it. Everything else is...