Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammon Shea

Amnesty International

Amol Rajan

Amol Rajan is a journalist and broadcaster. He has been the BBC's Media Editor since December 2016 and was formerly editor of the Independent. He presents Radio 4's Rethink, The Media Show and Start the Week and appears on BBC Radio 2 and The One Show. He lives in London with his family.

Amor Towles is the author of New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, The Lincoln Highway, and the short story collection Table for Two. His books have collectively sold more than eight million copies and have been translated into more than forty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Amor Towles

Amos Elon

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He died in December 2018.

Amos Oz

Amrit Birdi

Amrou Al-Kadhi

Amryl Johnson was a poet, author and performer born in Trinidad. She was brought up by her grandparents until the age of 11, when she moved to Britain to join her parents. She attended secondary school in London and went on to study British, African and Caribbean literature at the University of Kent. She taught at the University of Warwick. Johnson's work was included in several anthologies, including News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of Westindian-British Poetry, Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain, Watchers &amp; Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain, The New British Poetry and Daughters of Africa.

Amryl Johnson

Amy Abdelnoor is a British Arab writer and English teacher. She studied English and Arabic at the University of Cambridge. She lived and worked in the West Bank and in refugee camps in Lebanon in her early twenties. These experiences inspired Ever Land, her debut novel, an early iteration of which was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is married with three children.

Amy Abdelnoor

Amy B. Harris

Amy Brill is an award-winning writer and producer who has worked for PBS and MTV. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Salon, Guernica, Time Out New York, and Redbook, among others, and anthologized in Before and After: Stories from New York and Lost and Found. She has won fellowships in fiction from the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel, the Millay Colony, Fundacion Valparaíso, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two small daughters. The Movement of Stars is her first novel.

Amy Brill

Amy Chan

Amy Chua

The Rangoon sisters, aka Amy and Emily Chung, are home cooks and junior doctors who started their sell-out supper club in 2013. Their number 1 fan is Grace Dent – who said that their Mohinga (fish chowder) was ‘the nicest thing I put in my mouth in 2017’ and in January 2018 they were number 1 in the Observer Food Monthly’s ‘Best 50 Things in Food 2018’. They have featured in Esquire, Khoollect, Observer and Evening Standard.

Amy Chung

Amy Cunningham is a novelist who grew up in rural Hertfordshire and now lives in Cornwall. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has published novels across genres which include; crime fiction, contemporary women’s fiction and horror. Amy has previously worked as a concierge for luxury apartments and as a maid in a 5* hotel, and so is no longer surprised at what the rich and fabulous get up to when they think no one's watching.

Amy Cunningham

Amy D. Shojai

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety, Edmondson has been named by Thinkers50 as the most influential management thinker in the world. Her work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Psychology Today and Harvard Business Review, and been drawn upon by companies including Google and Microsoft. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Amy Edmondson

Amy Forbes-Robertson and Alex Fryer are the founders of ItHappens, which delivers sex and relationships lessons to students aged 9 and upwards, parents and teachers in over 200 UK schools. They are also core members of the Sex Education Forum and recently served as consultants on the Channel 4 show Let's Talk About Sex.

Amy Forbes-Robertson

Amy Goodman

Amy Griffin is the founder of the investment firm G9 Ventures. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Bumble, Spanx, and Gagosian, in addition to the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Women’s Board of the Boys Club of New York. She lives in New York City with her husband, John, and their four children.

Amy Griffin

Amy Grimes is a London based illustrator who graduated from Camberwell College of Art in 2014 with a first in Illustration. 
 
Particularly inspired by nature and the natural patterns found there, Amy's bright and bold illustrations, feature botanical motifs and leafy landscapes. Amy's work is mainly created digitally, using a variety of hand-painted textures, which are scanned and assembled in Photoshop into digital collages. 
 
Since graduating Amy has worked for clients including Quarto, White Lion Publishing, Scribbler, UK Greetings and Papier.

Amy Grimes

Dubliner Amy Huberman went into acting straight after leaving university. Her star has been rising steadily ever since. She is the author of two number one bestselling novels, Hello Heartbreak and I Wished for You. Hello Heartbreak was nominated for two Irish Book Awards in 2010, Best Irish Newcomer of the Year and Eason's Irish Popular Fiction of the Year Award. She lives in Dublin with her husband, international rugby star Brian O'Driscoll.

Amy Huberman

AMY JONES is a writer and AV producer. She is also the co-presenter of the storytelling podcast And Then What?, and has written for the Telegraph and the Independent. She also wrote for The Pool about everything from the tyranny of diets and misadventures in self-care to the number of slang terms for the vagina. She was born in Wales and now lives with her husband and their adorable cat Flick.

Amy Jones

Amy Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn't Forever, which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a Book of the Year in the Guardian, New Statesman and The Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At the Pond, Granta, the Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Amy Key

Amy Krouse Rosenthal was born in 1965, and graduated from Tufts University. A prolific writer, speaker, film maker, and radio show host, she also contributed to TED Talks and wrote several adult and children's books.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Amy Lawrence has been writing about football ever since she faced the dilemma of going to the 1994 World Cup or forsaking the trip to take her first job on the editorial team of Four Four Two magazine. She has mostly covered the beautiful game for the Guardian and the Observer, and broadcasts for BBC on Radio 5 Live and Match of the Day 2 Extra. Her books include three works on Arsenal, whose beat she has followed for many years - Proud To Say That Name, Invincible, and The Wenger Revolution. She has ghostwritten autobiographies for David Ginola (From St Tropez to St James's) and Ray Parlour (The Romford Pele), and composed the text for the photographic work David Beckham VII. Amy was voted the FSA Football Writer of the Year in 2014, and the Words By Women Sports Journalist of the Year and Women In Football Journalist of the Year in 2016.

Amy Lawrence

Amy Lea is a Canadian bureaucrat by day and romance and YA author by night (and weekends). She writes laugh out loud romantic comedies featuring strong heroines, witty banter, mid-2000s pop culture references, and happily ever afters. When Amy is not writing, she can be found fan-girling over other romance books on Instagram (@amyleabooks), eating potato chips with reckless abandon, and snuggling with her husband and goldendoodle. Her third book, The Catch is coming in early 2024.

Amy Lea

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Lucian

Described by a later Greek historian as "a man seriously committed to raising a laugh", Lucian exulted in the exposure of absurdity and the puncturing of pretension, and was capable of finding a comic angle on almost any subject.  In this selection we see him conversing with his literary enemies, railing against hypocrisy and the vanity of human wealth and power, and taking a wry look at the power of lust and the unsatisfactory nature of deviant sexual practices.

Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches

Wendy Doniger

Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventy-five seminal myths are the many incarnations of Vishnu, who saves mankind from destruction, and the mischievous child Krishna, alongside stories of the minor gods, demons, rivers and animals including boars, buffalo, serpents and monkeys. Immensely varied and bursting with colour and life, they demonstrate the Hindu belief in the limitless possibilities of the world - from the teeming miracles of creation to the origins of the incarnation of Death who eventually touches them all.

Hindu Myths

A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit

Anton Chekhov

At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people. Ivanov depicts a man stifled by inactivity and lost idealism, and The Seagull contrasts a young man's selfish romanticism with the stoicism of a woman cruelly abandoned by her lover. With 'the scenes from country life' of Uncle Vanya, his first fully mature play, Chekhov developed his own unique dramatic world, neither tragedy nor comedy. In Three Sisters the Prozorov sisters endlessly dream of going to Moscow to escape the monotony of provincial life, while his comedy The Cherry Orchard portrays characters futilely clinging to the past as their land is sold from underneath them.

Plays

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supreme powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, this is an unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici.

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Francis Bacon

One of the major political figures of his time, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) served in the court of Elizabeth I and ultimately became Lord Chancellor under James I in 1617. A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy and science - declaring early in his career that 'I have taken all knowledge as my province'. In this, his most famous work, he considers a diverse range of subjects, such as death and marriage, ambition and atheism, in prose that is vibrant and rich in Renaissance learning. Bacon believed that rhetoric - the force of eloquence and persuasion - could lead the mind to the pure light of reason, and his own rhetorical genius is nowhere better expressed than in these vivid essays.

The Essays

Søren Kierkegaard

One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of 'despair', alerting readers to the diversity of ways in which they may be described as living in this state of bleak abandonment - including some that may seem just the opposite - and offering a much-discussed formula for the eradication of despair. With its penetrating account of the self, this late work by Kierkegaard was hugely influential upon twentieth-century philosophers including Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Sickness unto Death can be regarded as one of the key works of theistic existentialist thought - a brilliant and revelatory answer to one man's struggle to fill the spiritual void.

The Sickness Unto Death

A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus

Ernst Junger

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'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest ...' 
 
Storm of Steel is one of the greatest works to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War. A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, it illuminates like no other book the horrors but also the fascination of total war, presenting the conflict through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. As an account of the terrors of the Western Front and of the sickening allure that made men keep fighting on for four long years, Storm of Steel has no equal.

Storm of Steel

Francois Voltaire

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. One of the masterpieces of the Enlightenment, this enormously influential work of sardonic wit - more a collection of essays arranged alphabetically, than a conventional dictionary - considers such diverse subjects as Abraham and Atheism, Faith and Freedom of Thought, Miracles and Moses. Repeatedly condemned by civil and religious authorities, Voltaire's work argues passionately for the cause of reason and justice, and criticizes Christian theology and contemporary attitudes towards war and society - and claims, as he regards the world around him: 'common sense is not so common'.

Philosophical Dictionary

Livy

Books VI-X of Livy's monumental work trace Rome's fortunes from its near collapse after defeat by the Gauls in 386 bc to its emergence, in a matter of decades, as the premier power in Italy, having conquered the city-state of Samnium in 293 bc. In this fascinating history, events are described not simply in terms of partisan politics, but through colourful portraits that bring the strengths, weaknesses and motives of leading figures such as the noble statesman Camillus and the corrupt Manlius vividly to life. While Rome's greatest chronicler intended his history to be a memorial to former glory, he also had more didactic aims - hoping that readers of his account could learn from the past ills and virtues of the city.

Rome and Italy

The History of Rome from its Foundation

Aristotle

The Metaphysics presents Aristotle's mature rejection of both the Platonic theory that what we perceive is just a pale reflection of reality and the hardheaded view that all processes are ultimately material. He argued instead that the reality or substance of things lies in their concrete forms, and in so doing he probed some of the deepest questions of philosophy: What is existence? How is change possible? And are there certain things that must exist for anything else to exist at all? The seminal notions discussed in The Metaphysics - of 'substance' and associated concepts of matter and form, essence and accident, potentiality and actuality - have had a profound and enduring influence, and laid the foundations for one of the central branches of Western philosophy.

The Metaphysics

Juvenal

Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors and gladiators, and of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern and upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony and invective make his work a stunningly satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society

The Sixteen Satires

Thomas Paine

This major collection demonstrates the extent to which Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an inspiration to the Americans in their struggle for independence, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and perhaps the outstanding English radical writer of his age. It contains all of Paine's major works including The Rights of Man, his groundbreaking defence of the revolutionary cause in France, Common Sense, which won thousands over to the side of the American rebels, and the first part of The Age of Reason (Part One), a ferocious attack on Christianity. The shorter pieces - on capital punishment, social reform and the abolition of slavery - also confirm the great versatility and power of this master of democratic prose.

Thomas Paine Reader

Xenophon

Xenophon's History recounts nearly fifty turbulent years of warfare in Greece between 411 and 362 BC. Continuing the story of the Peloponnesian War at the point where Thucydides finished his magisterial history, this is a fascinating chronicle of the conflicts that ultimately led to the decline of Greece, and the wars with both Thebes and the might of Persia. An Athenian by birth, Xenophon became a firm supporter of the Spartan cause, and fought against the Athenians in the battle of Coronea. Combining history and memoir, this is a brilliant account of the triumphs and failures of city-states, and a portrait of Greece at a time of crisis.

A History of My Times

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was one of the foremost philosophers of the eighteenth century and wrote widely on aesthetics, politics and society. In this landmark work, he propounds his theory that the sublime and the beautiful should be regarded as distinct and wholly separate states - the first, an experience inspired by fear and awe, the second an expression of pleasure and serenity. Eloquent and profound, A Philosophical Enquiry is an involving account of our sensory, imaginative and judgmental processes and their relation to artistic appreciation. Burke's work was hugely influential on his contemporaries and also admired by later writers such as Matthew Arnold and William Wordsworth. This volume also contains several of his early political works on subjects including natural society, government and the American colonies, which illustrate his liberal, humane views.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful

Lucy Moore

An enthralling anthology of 18th-century writings that gives a fascinating insight into the dreadful misdeeds of - and the horrible punishments meeted out to - an array of rogues and criminals, from murderers and swindlers to prostitutes and pirates.  Captured in memoirs, letters, ballads and court transcripts are some of the most colourful villains ever to take their last gasp at the hangman's noose, including daring thief Jack Sheppherd, highwayman Dick Turpin and ingenious pickpocket Jenny Diver.  Taking us from the backstreets and brothels to Newgate prison and the gallows at Tyburn, this anthology reveals London's murky underworld in all its squalor and exuberance.

Con Men and Cutpurses

Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld

Stendhal

In 1818, when he was in his mid-thirties, Stendhal met and fell passionately in love with the beautiful Mathilde Dembowski. She, however, was quick to make it clear that she did not return his affections, and in his despair he turned to the written word to exorcise his love and explain his feelings. The result is an intensely personal dissection of the process of falling - and being - in love: a unique blend of poetry, anecdote, philosophy, psychology and social observation. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal created a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.

Love

Baldesar Castiglione

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. In a lively series of imaginary conversations between the real-life courtiers to the Duke of Urbino, his speakers discuss qualities of noble behaviour - chiefly discretion, decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness - as well as wider questions such as the duties of a good government and the true nature of love. Castiglione's narrative power and psychological perception make this guide both an entertaining comedy of manners and a revealing window onto the ideals and preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance at the moment of its greatest splendour.

The Book of the Courtier

The Dhammapada is a collection of aphorisms that illustrate the moral teachings of Buddha - the spiritual path to the supreme Truth. Probably compiled in the third century BCE, the verses are arranged according to theme, covering ideas such as self-possession, good and evil, watchfulness and endurance. Together they describe how an individual can attain the enlightenment of Nirvana, the supreme goal of Buddhism. The road to Nirvana, as illustrated in The Dhammapada, is narrow and difficult to negotiate, but the reward of eternal life gives hope and determination to the traveller.

The Dhammapada

Plutarch

These nine biographies illuminate the careers, personalities and military campaigns of some of Rome's greatest statesmen, whose lives span the earliest days of the Republic to the establishment of the Empire. Selected from Plutarch's Roman Lives, they include prominent figures who achieved fame for their pivotal roles in Roman history, such as soldierly Marcellus, eloquent Cato and cautious Fabius. Here too are vivid portraits of ambitious, hot-tempered Coriolanus; objective, principled Brutus and open-hearted Mark Anthony, who would later be brought to life by Shakespeare. In recounting the lives of these great leaders, Plutarch also explores the problems of statecraft and power and illustrates the Roman people's genius for political compromise, which led to their mastery of the ancient world.

The Makers of Rome

Ben Jonson

The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. Volpone portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances will flock to his bedside with extravagant gifts in hope of an inheritance. The Alchemist also deals with greed and gullibility, as a rascally trio of confidence tricksters, claiming to have the legendary Philosopher's Stone, fool a series of victims who are hoping to make some easy money. And in a wonderfully energetic portrait of Jacobean life, Bartholomew Fair shows a diverse group of Londoners sampling the delights and temptations of the Fair - and the traders, prostitutes and cutpurses who set out to exploit them.

Volpone and Other Plays

Bartolome Las Casas

Bartolomé de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus's voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting the Indian community. He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries.

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

John Newman

John Henry Newman, one of the towering figures of the early Victorian Church of England, caused shock and outrage in equal measure when he announced his espousal of Roman Catholicism in 1845. His Apologia, written nearly twenty years later in response to a scurrilous public attack by Charles Kingsley, is a superbly crafted response to those who criticized his actions and questioned his motives, and traces his spiritual development since boyhood, his close involvement in the high church Tractarian Movement and his agonizing decision to reject the church he had been born into. Ostensibly an autobiography and a speech for the defence, the Apologia transcends self-justification to explore the very nature of Christianity and its place in the modern age.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

David Hume

In the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume attacked many of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, expressing the belief that religion is founded on ignorance and irrational fears. Though calm and courteous in tone - at times even tactfully ambiguous - the conversations between Hume's vividly realized fictional figures form perhaps the most searching case ever mounted against orthodox Christian theological thinking and the 'deism' of the time, which pointed to the wonders of creation as conclusive evidence of God's Design. Hume's characters debate these issues with extraordinary passion, lucidity and humour, in one of the most compelling philosophical works ever written.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Giorgio Vasari

In his Lives of the Artists of the Italian Renaissance, Vasari demonstrated a literary talent that outshone even his outstanding abilities as a painter and architect. 
Through character sketches and anecdotes he depicts Piero di Cosimo shut away in his derelict house, living only to paint; Giulio Romano's startling painting of Jove striking down the giants; and his friend Francesco Salviati, whose biography also tells us much about Vasari's own early career. Vasari's original and soaring vision plus his acute aesthetic judgements have made him one of the most influential art historians of all time.

Lives of the Artists

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creation and mortality. With their startling combination of harsh reality and sublime beauty, formal ingenuity and revolutionary poetic language, these poems, including a generous selection from Les Fleurs du Mal, show Baudelaire as one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century.

Selected Poems

Sigmund Freud

The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria is among the most pervasive of human disorders - yet at the same time it is the most elusive. Freud's recognition that hysteria stemmed from traumas in the patient's past transformed the way we think about sexuality. Studies in Hysteria is one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis, revolutionizing our understanding of love, desire and the human psyche.

Studies in Hysteria

Michel Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. 
 
 In 1572, Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'essays', inspired by the ideas he found in books from his library and his own experience. 
 
 He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. Above all, Montaigne studied himself to find his own inner nature and that of humanity. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature. An insight into a wise Renaissance mind, they continue to engage, enlighten and entertain modern readers. 
 
 Born in 1533, Michel de Montaigne studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection. He died in 1586. 
 
 Dr M.A. Screech is regarded as the world's greatest authority on Montaigne.

The Complete Essays

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. On Some Lines of Virgil opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and makes a revolutionary case for the equality of the sexes. In On Experience he superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne's distinctive voice - that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.

Gavin Alexander

Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip Sidney's Defense. Here he set out to answer contemporary critics &, with reference to Classical models of criticism, formulated a manifesto for English literature. Also includes George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Samuel Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, & passages by writers such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon & George Gascoigne.

Sidney's 'The Defence of Poesy' and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism

Charles Darwin

No book made a greater impact on the intellectual world of its first Victorian readers nor has had such an enduring influence on our thinking on science, literature, theology and philosophy. 
 
In The Descent of Man, Darwin addresses the crucial question of the origins, evolution and racial divergence of mankind, that he had deliberately left out of On the Origin of Species. And the evidence he presents forces us to question what it is that makes us uniquely human.

The Descent of Man

Selection in Relation to Sex

Robert Langdon Illustrated

Rockstar Detectives

A hilarious illustrated series for young readers set in Ancient Rome.

Romans on the Rampage

These spy thrillers set in Ancient Rome follow Sebastos Pantera and his return from the cold of a mission in Britannia to spy for Emperor Nero. Rome is burning, and only Sebastos can save it.

Rome

Rome Escape Line

Rose Harbor

Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

Rukmini’s Roasting Tin

Rutshire Chronicles

An experienced special forces operative, and later a CIA paramilitary officer, Ryan Drake is a man who finds people who don't want to be found. Once a soldier in the British Army, he now works for the CIA as a 'shepherd' - an elite investigation team that finds and brings home missing agents.

Ryan Drake

Ryan Lock

SAPIENS: A GRAPHIC HISTORY

SERAPHINA

Sage of the Unfated

Sam Berger Series

Sam Dryden

Sanctuary Lane

Sarah Tanner

Sarah and Duck

Say Goodnight Little...

School Bus Graveyard

School Rumble

Scope

Scotland Yard Murder Squad

DC Rachel Bailey has dragged herself up from a deprived childhood and joined the Manchester Police. Rachel's boss thinks her new recruit has bags of raw talent but straight-laced DC Janet Scott, her reluctant partner, has her doubts. 
The two go on to become an unstoppable duo, as seen in the hit TV series.

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