An irresistible invitation to reject the work ethic and enjoy life's simple pleasures (such as laughing, drinking and lying in the open air), Robert Louis Stevenson's witty and seminal essay on the...
Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy. Here he sets out his subversive views in a series of aphorisms on subjects ranging from art to arrogance, bored...
The Father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction that we must all create our own nature; in this great work of religious anxiety, he argues that a true understan...
William James's strong beliefs in a pragmatic theory of truth - that truth is only as relevant as its effect on us - lead to these absorbing essays on fact and belief. Within them is a fascinating ...
Foucault's writings on power and control in social institutions have made him one of the modern era's most influential thinkers. Here he argues that punishment has gone from being mere spectacle to...
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened...
Vividly imagining the second coming and capture of Christ during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, this parable recounted in The Brothers Karamazov is a profound, nuanced exploration of faith, s...
In his moving essay, Samuel Johnson offers wise words on confronting grief at the loss of a loved one. The other pieces here, ranging from art to marriage to morality, demonstrate the brilliance, p...
Leopardi, poet and philosopher, explores in humorous but savage dialogue the power of fashion and its strange irrationality. He also imagines conversations between Hercules and Atlas, Nature and an...
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government...
This collection of speeches from one of the great modern orators includes Churchill's famous words on the declaration of war with Germany, as well as his rousing call to the British in June 1940 af...
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened...
Influencing philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, and still strikingly modern in its psychological insights, Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death explores the concept of 'despair' as a symptom of...
This is Freud's groundbreaking study of a wealthy young Russian man, subject to psychotic episodes and neuroses. Through the patient's dream of childhood wolves, Freud was able to determine his rea...
These are Shakespeare's greatest writings on power in all its forms - in love, in war, in politics and in the family. From Macbeth's vaulting ambition to Richard II's fragile grip on authority, fro...
Created by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Pascal, the essays contained in Human Happiness are a curiously optimistic look at whether humans can ever find satisfaction and rea...
Written at a time when most of Europe supported the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s prescient and, at the time, controversial denunciation of its mob rule predicted the Terror, began the mo...