The Time Machine: Unabridged (Penguin Modern Classics)

The inventor-hero announces to a group of friends that the geometry they learned at school was a misconception, and promises--despite their incredulity--that he will prove experimentally that time is the fourth dimension. He produces a minute machine, points out two levers marked "past" and "future" and presses one, whereupon the model grows indistinct and then vanishes. He then shows them the full-scale machine in which he himself will time-travel. Eight days later he reappears dirty, hungry, bleeding, and exhausted: with poetic intensity he describes the sun jerking from solstice to solstice while the moon spins through her quarters. The world he has visited was divided into a soft, idle aristocracy and a vicious underclass of murderous workers: in other words, a powerful social allegory reflecting his own innate radicalism.

Brian Cox's reading is both convincing and gripping, as he relives his helpless headlong flight to the world of AD 802701.--Betty Tadman