The Langley Press: 10 books

'When he was at Florence he contracted a friendship with the famous Galileo Galileo, whom he extremely venerated and magnified; and not only as he was a prodigious wit, but for his sweetness of nature and manners.They pretty well resembled one another as to their countenances, as by their pictures...

Born in London to highly cultured Italian parents, the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a passionate translator of the poetry of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries. The Langley Press selection includes love sonnets not included in Dante's Vita Nuova, and others by poets including Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Orlandi and Cecco Angliolieri.

'And soon after came to them an horrible fish, which followed the ship long time, casting so much water out of his mouth into the ship, that they supposed to have been drowned...' Saint Brendan sets off from Ireland with fourteen companions, and sees many strange sights in 'the great sea ocean,...

'I here lay down to you the truth, and nothing but the truth: the naked and plain truth, which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin's cheek.' The Langley Press edition includes the lives of Aubrey's...

'After eight days they came within view of an island which was very rugged and rocky, and covered over with slag. There were no trees or other plants, but the island was full of blacksmiths’ forges. Brendan said to his brothers, ‘I have a bad feeling about this island. I have no wish to go ashore,...

Aubrey tells us that from an early age he liked to talk to old people, ‘as living histories’. Since the biographer was born in 1626, many of the human chronicles he consulted would have had fresh memories of the Elizabethan age. This selection, the second from the Langley Press, covers...

'On the 27th of the sixth month, called August, 1725, my husband and all our men-servants being abroad, eleven Indians, armed with tomahawks and guns, who had some time before been skulking about the fields, and watching an opportunity of our men’s absence, came furiously into the house...' ...

'At this time, Cuthbert was keeping watch over flocks of sheep on some remote mountains. One night he was staying awake, praying through the night, with his companions sleeping beside him. Suddenly he saw a light streaming down from heaven, breaking through the darkness. In the light were choirs of...

Quakers have been writing poetry about their extraordinary faith and way of life since the beginning of the Society of Friends, in the middle of the seventeenth century. This book brings together poems about Quakerism by Quakers and non-Quakers from the first 250 years of the Society.

'Richard . . . was . . . little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard-favoured of visage . . . malicious, wrathful, envious . . .' The History of King Richard III by Thomas More, the celebrated 'man for all seasons', gives us King...