'No true Democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist.'In this selection from The Social Contract, Rousseau asserts that a state's only legitimate political authority comes from its ...
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminde...
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...
The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the cityWe live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in th...
One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Em...
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...
'Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.'Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett...
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...