Locations of events.

What’s the price for a human life? How much would it take for you to go to war? The biography of the Swiss farmer Ulrich Bräker shows: Human life was cheap during the Seven Years’ War – just like the mercenaries’ pay.

The opposite of love is not hate but indifference – as Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights shows. Because their love cannot be, two lovers destroy each other until the bitter end, in this depressing but beautifully atmospheric novel.

Ungrateful daughters and betrayed fathers: an old topos in world literature. Just like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Balzac’s Old Goriot has to learn the hard way what it means when his daughters take away everything you own. Until you end up emptyhanded.

Jane Austen is sometimes devalued as “women’s literature”: sentimental, touchy-feely love stories, you know. In Victorian England, however, critics thought her not feminine enough. Why such categorizations are silly and Jane Austen’s novels sentimental only in the best way.

We know Andersen above all as the creator of the little mermaid. Yet he wrote a plethora of other fairytales for children, full of magic and grace. Why reading the Danish poet today is still worth it.