In the Library
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift, 1726
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 41
- Length
- Length 105k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Don Quixote
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Cervantes invented the traveller whose journeys reveal more about home than about anywhere he visits.
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About the book
Children get the sanded-down version: a man tied to the ground by people six inches high. The real book is colder, stranger, and far funnier. Lemuel Gulliver, ship's surgeon, washes ashore four times, and each landfall is a lens ground to a different power. In Lilliput, two empires wage war over which end of an egg to crack, and the joke is how familiar the fervor feels. In Brobdingnag, a giant king studies humanity through a magnifying glass and pronounces it a pest, and you cannot honestly fault his evidence. Then Swift removes the comedy: among the serene, reasoning horses of the last voyage, the human creature appears as the Yahoo, filthy and shrieking, and Gulliver can never again unsee it. The triumph is the voice, the flat and reasonable monotone of a man reporting only what he saw, dismantling the whole species without once raising itself. He comes home sane by every measure but the human one.