Mary and her steady, Jack, have differing opinions on "the stage"-- Mary wishes to devote her life to the craft, while Jack strives to settle down and leave all that play-acting behind. When a traveling troupe that performs a Fall-of-Roman epic is ordered to strike, both Mary and Jack are called upon to participate in their stead.

A Mutt and Jeff cartoon.

The young Chiarina di Vallefiorita is forced by her father to marry an old, fat, rich man. With the help ot the monk of a nearby convent, she will escape her fate.

In 1923, the young French writer Raymond Radiguet (1903-23) published The Devil in the Flesh, a novel that caused a great scandal by telling the story of the love affair between a married woman and a teenager in the middle of World War I.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, the seminal work of Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), continues to find new readers and inspire artists and creators around the world more than a century after its publication in 1891, because it was endowed with all the elements necessary to make it an undisputed heritage of world literature.

On January 31, 1857, the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) took his place in the dock for contempt of public morality and religion. The accused, the real one, is, through him, Emma Bovary, heroine with a thousand faces and a thousand desires, guilty without doubt of an unforgivable desire to live.

An analysis of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, published in 2006, which dissects the ruthless mechanisms of the Shoah from the detached point of view of Maximilian Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer.

An intimate portrait, in his own words, of the Indian writer Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses (1988), thirty years after the fatwa uttered by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini: his youth in multicultural Bombay, his life in England, his many years of forced hiding, his thoughts on President Trump's United States of America.