"In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sit Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder...

"Travesties" was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin – were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this...

"Dirty Linen is a comedy about a Parliamentary investigation of the sexual indiscretions of a number of M.P.'s with the voluptuous Maddie Gotobed. New-Found-Land is a one-act play within the play." --

"Taking its title from the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Gretl, a Catholic. As the play begins, Gretl is hosting her extended family at their fashionable Vienna apartment at Christmastime, 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust,...

Encompassing work from nearly twenty years of Stoppard's career, this new collection showcases the playwright's dazzling range and virtuosic talent. The Real Inspector Hound is the ultimate country-house whodunit; After Magritte attempts to explain the inexplicable; NewFound-Land chronicles an American's attempt to become a British citizen; Dirty Linen is a daring political farce; and Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth wickedly subverts Shakespeare....

"While on a visit to India, the young poet Flora Crewe has her portrait painted by Nirad Das, an Indian artist. Das, however, has painted two portraits of Crewe: a "proper" one and a nude, the latter remaining in the possession of his son. The nude represents the "more Indian" side of Nirad Das, which is exactly how Crewe wants him to be, for if he anglicized himself she would despise him, since he would be attempting to bring the bloodlines closer...

Hapgood, an extraordinary British secret service officer, is at the center of a web of double and triple agents.