About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Ved Mehta

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Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles

Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.

Portrait of India

M. K. Gandhi

Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself.  He feared the enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding of his quest for truth rooted in devotion to God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices, celibacy, and a life without violence. This is not a straightforward narrative biography, in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi offers his life story as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps.

An Autobiography

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), who led the Macedonian army to victory in Egypt, Syria, Persia and India, was perhaps the most successful conqueror the world has ever seen. Yet although no other individual has attracted so much speculation across the centuries, Alexander himself remains an enigma. Curtius' History offers a great deal of information unobtainable from other sources of the time. A compelling narrative of a turbulent era, the work recounts events on a heroic scale, detailing court intrigue, stirring speeches and brutal battles - among them, those of Macedonia's great war with Persia, which was to culminate in Alexander's final triumph over King Darius and the defeat of an ancient and mighty empire. It also provides by far the most plausible and haunting portrait of Alexander we possess: a brilliantly realized image of a man ruined by constant good fortune in his youth.

The History of Alexander

Malcolm X

Alex Haley

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims.  As their spokesman he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and self-respect.  This autobiography (written with Alex Haley) reveals his quick-witted integrity, usually obscured by batteries of frenzied headlines, and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Shah of Shahs depicts the final years of the Shah in Iran, and is a compelling meditation on the nature of revolution and the devastating results of fear. Here, Kapuscinski describes the tyrannical monarch, who, despite his cruel oppression of the Iranian people, sees himself as the father of a nation, who can turn a backward country into a great power - a vain hope that proves a complete failure. Yet even as Iran becomes a 'behemoth of riches' and as the Shah lives like a European billionaire, its people live in a climate of fear, terrorized by the secret police. Told with intense power and feeling, Kapuscinski portrays the inevitable build-up to revolution - a cataclysmic upheaval that delivered Iran into the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Shah of Shahs

Plutarch

The biographies collected in this volume bring together Plutarch's Lives of those great men who established the city of Rome and consolidated its supremacy, and his Comparisons with their notable Greek counterparts. Here he pairs Romulus, mythical founder of Rome, with Theseus, who brought Athens to power, and compares the admirable Numa and Lycurgus for bringing order to their communities, while Titus Flamininus and Philopoemen are portrayed as champions of freedom. As well as providing an illuminating picture of the first century AD, Plutarch depicts complex and nuanced heroes who display the essential virtues of Greek civilization - courage, patriotism, justice, intelligence and reason - that contributed to the rise of Rome.

The Rise of Rome

John Mandeville

Ostensibly written by an English knight, the Travels purport to relate his experiences in the Holy Land, Egypt, India and China. Mandeville claims to have served in the Great Khan's army, and to have travelled in 'the lands beyond' - countries populated by dog-headed men, cannibals, Amazons and Pygmies. Although Marco Polo's slightly earlier narrative ultimately proved more factually accurate, Mandeville's was widely known, used by Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Frobisher, and inspiring writers as diverse as Swift, Defoe and Coleridge. This intriguing blend of fact, exaggeration and absurdity offers both fascinating insight into and subtle criticism of fourteenth-century conceptions of the world.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Arrian

Although written over four hundred years after Alexander's death, Arrian's account of the man and his achievements is the most reliable we have. Arrian's own experience as a military commander gave him unique insights into the life of the world's greatest conqueror. 
He tells of Alexander's violent suppression of the Theban rebellion, his defeat of Persia and campaigns through Egypt and Babylon - establishing new cities and destroying others in his path. While Alexander emerges as a charismatic leader, Arrian succeeds brilliantly in creating an objective portrait of a man of boundless ambition, who was exposed to the temptations of power.

The Campaigns of Alexander

William Tyndale

One of the key foundation books of the English Reformation, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) makes a radical challenge to the established order of the all-powerful Church of its time. Himself a priest, Tyndale boldly claims that there is just one social structure created by God to which all must be obedient, without the intervention of the rule of the Pope. He argues that Christians cannot be saved simply by performing ceremonies or by hearing the Scriptures in Latin, which most could not understand, and that all should have access to the Bible in their own language - an idea that was then both bold and dangerous. Powerful in thought and theological learning, this is a landmark in religious and political thinking.

The Obedience of a Christian Man

John Kenneth Galbraith

'One of the most engrossing books I have ever read' Daily Telegraph 
 
John Kenneth Galbraith's now-classic account of the 1929 stock market collapse remains the definitive book on the most disastrous cycle of boom and bust in modern times. 
 
Vividly depicting the causes, effects, aftermath and long-term consequences of financial meltdown, Galbraith also describes the people and the corporations who were affected by the catastrophe. With its depiction of the 'gold-rush fantasy' ingrained in America's psychology, The Great Crash 1929 remains a penetrating study of human greed and folly.

The Great Crash 1929

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

James Baldwin

'Candid, insightful, moving . . . a memoir, a chronicle of and commentary on America's abortive civil-rights movement' -The New York Times 
 In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose. 
 Timeless, tender and profound, Baldwin’s searing narrative contains the multiplicities of what it means to be Black in America and, indeed, around the world.

No Name in the Street

Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani

Six hundred years ago, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani - an esteemed Islamic scholar and poet - survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, as well as millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, al-Asqalani reflects on the origins of plagues, from those of the Prophet Muhammad's era to the Black Death of his own. 
 
Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, poetry, and the author's personal experiences, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience and care for those around us.

Merits of the Plague

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

What makes a leader? How does their character affect the fate of their people? Plutarch illustrates the rise and fall of Athens through nine lives, from the legendary days of Theseus, the city's founder, through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias and Alcibiades, to the razing of its walls by Lysander. Plutarch's real interest is not in the greatness of their victories or achievements but in their moral strengths and failings - and he holds the weakness and ambition of its leaders responsible for the city's fall.

The Rise And Fall of Athens

Antoine Saint-Exupery

The French Writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), was born in Lyon. His first two books, SOUTHERN MAIL and NIGHT FLIGHT, are distinguished by a poetic evocation of the romance and discipline of flying. Later works, including WIND, SAND AND STARS and FLIGHT TO ARRAS, stress his humanistic philosophy. Saint-Exupéry's popular children's book THE LITTLE PRINCE is also read by adults for its allegorical meaning. Saint-Exupéry's plane disappeared during a mission in World War II.

Flight to Arras

T. E. Lawrence

Although 'continually and bitterly ashamed' that the Arabs had risen in revolt against the Turks as a result of fraudulent British promises of self-rule, Lawrence led them in a triumphant campaign which revolutionized the art of war. 
 
Seven Pillars of Wisdom recreates epic events with extraordinary vividness. In the words of E. M. Forster, 'Round this tent-pole of a military chronicle, T. E. has hung an unexampled fabric of portraits, descriptions, philosophies, emotions, adventures, dreams'. However flawed, Lawrence is one of the twentieth century's most fascinating figures. This is the greatest monument to his character and achievements.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the Second World War.

The Gathering Storm

The Second World War

Ulysses Grant

Faced with cancer and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future. In doing so he won himself a unique place in American letters.  Acclaimed by writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein, Grant's memoirs demonstrate the intelligence, intense determination, and laconic modesty that made him the Union's foremost commander. PERSONAL MEMOIRS is devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier. For their directness and clarity, his writings on war are without rival in American Literature.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S.Grant

Xenophon

In The Persian Expedition, Xenophon, a young Athenian noble who sought his destiny abroad, provides an enthralling eyewitness account of the attempt by a Greek mercenary army - the Ten Thousand - to help Prince Cyrus overthrow his brother and take the Persian throne. When the Greeks were then betrayed by their Persian employers, they were forced to march home through hundreds of miles of difficult terrain - adrift in a hostile country and under constant attack from the unforgiving Persians and warlike tribes. In this outstanding description of endurance and individual bravery, Xenophon, one of those chosen to lead the retreating army, provides a vivid narrative of the campaign and its aftermath, and his account remains one of the best pictures we have of Greeks confronting a 'barbarian' world.

The Persian Expedition

Svetlana Alexievich

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
'Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love - love which can make you do the most spectacular things ' Sheena Patel, Observer 
 
'- A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised version - 
 
In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. 
 
A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. 
 
'Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking' - Arundhati Roy, Elle 
 
'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer

Chernobyl Prayer

Voices from Chernobyl

Penguin Modern Classics

Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli is one of the most famous strategists of all time. In this collection he discusses the dangers of conspiracies, and the component parts of an army, vital for gaining and holding power in his day. He also gives advice on tactics and discipline, and explains why promises made under force ought not to be kept. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

On Conspiracies

Elaine Brown

"I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?" So said Elaine Brown on becoming the first female leader of the Black Panther Party in 1974. By that time the group had grown from a small local outfit into a national revolutionary movement, described by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as 'the greatest threat to the internal security of the country'. 
 
Brown's gripping memoir charts her rise from an impoverished neighbourhood in Philadelphia, through a political awakening during a bohemian adolescence, and on to her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers and her ascent into its upper echelons. As an unfortgettable portrayal of Black girlhood in 1950s Philadelphia and the revolutionary experience in 1960s California, A Taste of Power is a seminal exploration of power, prejudice and the struggle for justice.

A Taste of Power

Julius Caesar

A military leader of legendary genius, Caesar was also a great writer, recording the events of his life with incomparable immediacy and power. The Civil War is a tense and gripping depiction of his struggle with Pompey over the leadership of Republican Rome - a conflict that spanned the entire Roman world, from Gaul and Spain to Asia and Africa. Where Caesar's own account leaves off in 48 BC, his lieutenants take up the history, describing the vital battles of Munda, Spain and Thapsus, and the installation of Cleopatra, later Caesar's mistress, as Queen of Egypt. Together these narratives paint a full picture of the events that brought Caesar supreme power - and paved the way for his assassination only months later.

The Civil War

Ernesto Che Guevara

Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and a great capacity to express his love and affection for his closest friends and family. 
 
This selection of Che Guevara's correspondence, beginning with letters penned in his early travels around Latin America as a medical student, shows how he polished his unique style over the years. This selection maps the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary and original political thinker from the wide-eyed young Argentine who set out to discover Latin America. Covering the entirety of Che's life, from his famous motorcycle journey around South America to the Cuban Revolutionary War, from the setting-up of the pioneering communist state of Cuba to his revolutionary travels to the Congo and Bolivia. But it also reveals a more intimate, personal side to Che, including his letters to his mother, wife and children. 
 
In one of his last letters to his young children, Che advised them to 'always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.'

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

Letters 1947-1967

Vladimir Lenin

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork The State and Revolution. This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated. 
 
Translated and edited with an introduction by Robert Service

The State and Revolution

Saul Bellow

In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and To Jerusalem and Back is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints &ndash; from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow&rsquo;s hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow&rsquo;s exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.

To Jerusalem and Back

Hannah Arendt

'Brilliant and disturbing' Stephen Spender, New York Review of Books 
 
The classic work on 'the banality of evil', and a journalistic masterpiece 
 
Hannah Arendt's stunning and unnverving report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. This edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, this classic portrayal of the banality of evil is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century. 
 
'Deals with the greatest problem of our time ... the problem of the human being within a modern totalitarian system' Bruno Bettelheim

Eichmann in Jerusalem

A Report on the Banality of Evil

Frederick Douglass

A newly edited collection of the seminal writings and speeches of a legendary writer, orator, and civil rights leader. 
 
The life of Frederick Douglass is nothing less than the history of America in the 19th century from slavery to reconstruction. His influence was felt in the political sphere, major social movements, literary culture, and even international affairs. His resounding words tell not only his own remarkable story, but also that of a burgeoning nation forced to reckon with its tremulous moral ground. This compact volume offers a full course on a necessary historical figure, giving voice once again to a man whose guiding words are needed now as urgently as ever. 
 
The Portable Frederick Douglass includes the full range of Douglass's writings, from autobiographical writings that span from his life as a slave child to his memories of slavery as an elder statesman in the late 1870s; his protest fiction (one of the first works of African American fiction); his brilliant oratory, constituting the greatest speeches of the Civil War era, which launched his political career; and his journalistic essays that range from cultural and political critique toart, literature, law, history, philosophy, and reform.

The Portable Frederick Douglass

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