Travelling on horseback through southern England in the early 19th century, William Cobbett provides evocative and accurate descriptions of the countryside, colourful accounts of his encounters with labourers, and indignant outbursts at the encroaching cities and the sufferings of the exploited poor.
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence.
Feeding Frenzy - Booker nominee Will Self's dazzling collection of journalism and writing'Self often writes non-fiction as though it were fiction, topping off what we know as reality with the cream of his surreality' GuardianDuring the turbulent years of 1995-2000, Will Self surfed the great wave of olive oil which nearly swept British metropolitan culture away, and produced a series of restaurant reviews for The Observer, whose coruscating criticality led to a cabal of restaurateurs plotting his contract killing.
City of God is an enduringly significant work in the history of Christian thought, by one of its central figuresWritten as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, this great theological and philosophical work by St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, examines the ancient pagan religions of Rome, the arguments of the Greek philosophers and the revelations of the Bible.
Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian.
De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm T ib n.
In these wonderfully stylish and eclectic essays, Charles Nicholl pursues the fugitive traces of the past with the skill and relish that have earned him a reputation as one of the finest literary and historical detectives of our time.
For the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero, 'the good life' was at once a life of contentment and one of moral virtue - and the two were inescapably intertwined.
George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the greatest writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes 'My Country Right or Left', 'Decline of the English Murder', 'Shooting an Elephant' and 'A Hanging'.
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form.
In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldesar Castiglione, a diplomat and Papal Nuncio to Rome, sets out to define the essential virtues for those at Court.
One of the most influential political texts ever written on America, and an indispensable authority on the nature of democracy In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through eastern America.
After the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, a number of his followers wrote dialogues featuring him as the protagonist and, in so doing, transformed the great philosopher into a legendary figure.
Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, first published in 1764, is a series of short, radical essays - alphabetically arranged - that form a brilliant and bitter analysis of the social and religious conventions that then dominated eighteenth-century French thought.
'It was with aweThat I beheldFresh leaves, green leaves,Bright in the sun'When the Japanese haiku master Basho composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was an ardent student of Zen Buddhism, setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment.
'Sentence by sentence, page by page, Bellow is simply the best writer we have' The New York Times Book ReviewIn It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over a forty-year period.
Taking the form of a dialogue between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, GORGIAS debates perennial questions about the nature of government and those who aspire to public office.
No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller.
A poet whose verse inspired music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was in his lifetime equally admired for his elegant prose.
Burke's seminal work was written during the early months of the French Revolution, and it predicted with uncanny accuracy many of its worst excesses, including the Reign of Terror.
During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion.
'When Dickens has described something you see it for the rest of your life' George OrwellIn 1844, Charles Dickens took a break from novel writing to travel through Italy for almost a year, and Pictures from Italy is an illuminating account of his experiences there.
IN THE SOUTH SEAS records Stevenson's travels with his wife Fanny and their family in the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilbert Islands during 1888-9.
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings is a collection that displays the full force of Edgar Allen Poe's mastery of both Gothic horror and the short story form.
One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history In his near-contemporary account of classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process.
Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era.
In these two closely linked works - a travel book and a biography of its author - we witness a moving encounter between two of the most daring and original minds of the late eighteenth century: A Short Residence in Sweden is the record of Wollstonecraft's last journey in search of happiness, into the remote and beautiful backwoods of Scandinavia.
'She is alive and active - we hear her voice and trace her influence even now' Virginia WoolfWriting in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792.
