Literary theory

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks looked at the cutting-edge work taking place in his field, and decided that much of it was not fit for purpose.

The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition.

American political theorist Robert Dahl's 1961 work of political theory exhibits deep levels of creative thinking.

Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a series of lessons in the applied art of problem solving.

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The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M.

Hamid Dabashi's 1997 work Theology of Discontent reveals a creative thinker capable not only of understanding how an argument is built, but also of redefining old issues in new ways.

Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 essay "e;Modern Moral Philosophy"e; is a cutting intervention in modern philosophy that shows the full power of good evaluative and analytical critical thinking skills.

Henry Kissinger's 2014 book World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History not only offers a summary of thinking developed throughout a long and highly influential career-it is also an intervention in international relations theory by one of the most famous statesmen of the twentieth century.

A critical analysis of David C.

A Room of One's Own is a very clear example of how creative thinkers connect and present things in novel ways.

Aristotle's Metaphysics is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, almost certainly never put together by Aristotle himself.

What is a self?

Thomas Robert Malthus' 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population helped change the direction of economics, politics, and the natural sciences with its reasoning and problem solving.

Thomas Piketty is a fine example of an evaluative thinker.

David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge.

English economist John Hobson's 1902 Imperialism: A Study was an epoch-making study of the politics and economics of imperialism that shook imperialist beliefs to their core.

Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue was a ground-breaking contribution to modern moral philosophy.

A guide to making new sense of the world, critically and generously.

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.

Arjun Appadurai's 1996 collection of essays Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization helped reshape how anthropologists, geographers and philosophers saw and understood the key topic of our times: globalization.

What makes a good manager?

Thomas Paine's 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history's most explosive and revolutionary books.

Ikujiro Nonaka's A Dynamic Theory of Organisational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, which Nonaka believes has the potential to guide managers' knowledge creation strategies.

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 personhood as gender had been for centuries.

The Defence of Poesy is the first major piece of literary criticism in English.

In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia.

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines.

The Republic is Plato's most complete and incisive work - a detailed study of the problem of how best to ensure that justice exists in a real society, rather than as merely the product of an idealized philosophical construct.

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland.

Historians of the American Revolution had always seen the struggle for independence either as a conflict sparked by heavyweight ideology, or as a war between opposing social groups acting out of self-interest.

Jacques Derrida's Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century.

English economist John Hobson's 1902 Imperialism: A Study was an epoch-making study of the politics and economics of imperialism that shook imperialist beliefs to their core.

Amartya Sen's Inequality Re-Examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality.

Paul Kennedy owes a great deal to the editor who persuaded him to add a final chapter to this study of the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of European powers since the age of Spain's Philip II.

Our Ecological Footprint presents a powerful model for measuring humanity's impact on the Earth to reduce the harm we are causing the planet before it's too late.

Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is one of the most influential texts of the 20th-century - an astonishing feat for what is, at heart, a series of deeply technical lectures about the structure of human languages.

Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down - and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills.

Why is it that children from disadvantaged backgrounds find it so difficult - and often impossible - to achieve?

Martin Buber's I and Thou argues that humans engage with the world in two ways.

David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology - holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it before.

John Maynard Keynes's 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a perfect example of the global power of critical thinking.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be seen, without exaggeration, as a landmark text in intellectual history.

Plato's Symposium, composed in the early fourth century BC, demonstrates how powerful the skills of reasoning and evaluation can be.

Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development.

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Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system.

What were the achievements of the 'angry' writers who emerged in the fifties?

In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia.