A young boy in 19th-century London runs away from an unhappy home, finds employment in a wine factory, and becomes aquainted with a wide variety of characters in the city streets.

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose. Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and...

In the affairs of his dead wife, a British publisher discovers compromising pictures of the foreign secretary who was her lover, presenting an opportunity for revenge on both the political and personal level.