Kidnapped By Robert Louis Stevenson

Published in 1886, the same year as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped is one of Stevenson’s most enduringly popular novels. At its centre is a historical event: the murder of Colin Campbell, the ‘Red Fox’ of Glenure in Scotland. The fiction that is developed around this event involves the child David Balfour whose father dies leaving his son with nothing to live on. David goes to live with his uncle Ebenezer. Ebenezer is a cruel and miserly individual. As a result of the illegality of his acquisition of the Balfour estate he instigates a series of malicious manoeuvres against David. Firstly he attempts to have the boy killed and then has him kidnapped. So David finds himself on a ship to the Carolinas accompanied by Alan Breck, an ‘honest gentleman’ and Jacobite. As fate would have it, the ship is wrecked on the rocks at Mull. The novel then follows David and Alan as they journey across the Highlands through numerous dangers and after witnessing and becoming suspects in the murder of Colin Campbell. The novel concludes with resolution, but the continuing Colin Campbell murder case and the later actions and romance of David are the subjects of Kidnapped’s sequel, Catriona (1893).

Beyond Good and Evil By Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will - until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us - or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

1984 (Part 1 & 2) by George Orwell

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels.