In Centuries of Childhood, the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea i
Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history – the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconf
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way. Kahneman’s work foc
In his 1997 work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond marshals evidence from five continents and across 13,000 years of human history in an attempt to answer the question of why that history unfolded
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the s
Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” sidesteps the stormy arguments surrounding “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author,” offering an entirely different way of looking at texts
Susan Sontag’s 1997 text, On Photography, brought photographic theory into the university classroom with its staunch defence of the medium as art and inspired a new wave of Marxist Criticism in the fi
Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex is a masterpiece of feminist criticism and philosophy. An incendiary take on the place of women in post-war French society, it helped define major trends
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way. Kahneman’s work foc
Burton Malkiel’s 1973 A Random Walk Down Wall Street was an explosive contribution to debates about how to reap a good return on investing in stocks and shares. Reissued and updated many times since,
Written by the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed attempts to explain the perplexities of biblical language—and apparent inconsistencies in the text—in the light
The Defence of Poesy is the first major piece of literary criticism in English. Taking aim at classical authors who disparaged poetry, and contemporary critics who saw literature as a corrupting influ
In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of per
The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition. Made up of twenty-two lengthy books, Augustine wrote his masterpiece over a thirteen-year period during whic
Martin Buber’s I and Thou argues that humans engage with the world in two ways. One is with the attitude of an ‘I’ towards an ‘It’, where the self stands apart from objects as items of experience or u
The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert’s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. I
