Enormous skyscrapers will house residents and workers who happily go "for weeks" without setting foot on the ground. Streamlined, "hurricane-proof" houses will pivot on their foundations like weather vanes. The family car will turn into an airplane so easily that "a woman can do it in five minutes." Our wars will be fought by robots. And our living room furniture — waterproof, of course — will clean up with a squirt from the garden hose.

In Yesterday's Tomorrows Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan explore the future as Americans earlier in the last century expected it to happen. Filled with vivid color images and lively text, the book is eloquent testimony to the confidence — and, at times, the naive faith — Americans have had in science and technology. The future that emerges here, the authors conclude, is one in which technology changes, but society and politics usually do not.

The authors draw on a wide variety of sources — popular-science magazines, science fiction, world fair exhibits, films, advertisements, and plans for things only dreamed of. From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future.

An examination and interpretation of the dreams and evocations that Cleopatra has inspired, including those created in her own life time. In the 2000 years since her death Cleopatra has been re-created over and over again, each time in a form that fits the prejudices and fantasies of the age that produced it. To Chaucer she was the model of a good wife, while to Cecil B.De Mille she was "the wickedest woman in history". These various Cleopatras can be read as mirror-images of the culture that produced them and this book is about them as well as the sexual, racial and constitutional politics of these cultures.

E.T.A. Hoffman's wildly original fictions are some of the most unusual examples of German Romanticism's dark passions, and the stories in "Tales of Hoffman" are selected and translated from the German with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale in "Penguin Classics". This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Suspense dominates tales such as "Mademoiselle de Scudery", in which an apprentice goldsmith and a female novelist find themselves caught up in a series of jewel thefts and murders. In the sinister "The Sandman", famously used by Sigmund Freud to illustrate both his concept of the unheimlich, or 'uncanny', and of Oedipal guilt, a young man's sanity is tormented by fears about a mysterious chemist; while in "The Choosing of a Bride" a greedy father preys on the weaknesses of his daughter's suitors. Master of the bizarre, Hoffman creates a sinister and unsettling world combining love and madness, black humour and bewildering illusion. This edition contains authoritative translations of Hoffman's best stories. In his introduction, R.J. Hollingdale explores the background of these works and examines the duality of Hoffman's life - a lawyer by day and creator of a world of fantasy by night. E.T.A Hoffmann (1776-1822) studied law and entered the Prussian civil service, but his over-riding ambition was to become a graphic artist and painter. He turned to fiction only in his thirties, living a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence as lawyer by day, author by night - and became one of the most influential authors of his time. If you enjoyed "Tales of Hoffman", you might also like Jorge Luis Borges' "Fictions", available in "Penguin Modern Classics".