"Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven."

It's the classic temptation - power. And these are the words John Milton puts on the forked tongue of the serpent when it speaks to Adam and Eve.

We know how it ends - an apple, nakedness and banishment.

But in 'Paradise Lost', Milton turns a few Bible verses into a true epic. In 10,000 lines of beautiful but dark verse, he tells the parallel stories of Satan and of Adam and Eve.

With greed, temptation, lust, sex, deception, shame and much more, it is a classic whose themes are as relevant and alluring today as ever before.