This hugely influential work marked a turning point in US history and culture, arguing that the nation's expansion into the Great West was directly linked to its unique spirit: a rugged individuali...
Gibbon's subversive and iconoclastic description of the rise of Christianity inspired outrage upon publication, and remains one of the most eloquent and damning indictments of the delusory nature o...
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...
Poet, aesthete and hedonist, Baudelaire was also one of the most groundbreaking art critics of his time. Here he explores beauty, fashion, dandyism, the purpose of art and the role of the artist, a...
Describing the silliness and 'feminine fatuity' of many popular books by lady novelists, George Eliot perfectly skewers the formulaic yet bestselling works that dominated her time, with their lovea...
Written after the discovery of over forty Bronze Age burial urns in seventeenth-century Norfolk, Sir Thomas Browne's profound consideration of the inevitability of death remains one of the most fas...
Describing the surreal hallucinations, insomnia and nightmarish visions he experienced while consuming daily large amounts of laudanum, Thomas De Quincey's legendary account of the pleasures and pa...
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...
Whether calling for an end to the capitalist system, addressing the crowds after the Russian Revolution, or attacking Stalin during his years of exile, Trotsky's speeches give an extraordinary insi...
Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materi...
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...
A profound influence on medieval Europe's view of the wider world, this thirteenth-century account of a Venetian merchant's amazing experiences in the court of the great Mongol leader, Kubilai Khan...
Aprofound consolation to early believers, these two books from the Bible deeply influenced the rise of the Christian church: the apocalyptic Revelation portraying the religion's ultimate triumph ov...
Not simply an investigation into melancholy, these unique essays form part of a panoramic celebration of human behaviour from the time of the ancients to the Renaissance. God, devils, old age, diet...
Describing bizarrely popular Victorian street slang, the madness of crowds, stock market mania (from the South Sea Bubble to Tulip fever), popular fashions, fads, crazes, schemes and scams, this br...
The founding father of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, living in an era of horrific violence, saw human life as meaningless and cruel; here, he argues the only way to escape this brutal...
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...
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...
Charles Darwin transformed our understanding of the world with the idea of natural selection, challenging the notion that species are fixed and unchanging. These writings from On the Origin of Spec...