Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Malcolm X

Alex Haley

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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

James Baldwin

Raoul Peck

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film 
 
In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 
 
'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 
 
'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety 
 
 'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian 
 
 'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

I Am Not Your Negro

Audre Lorde

I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here. 
 
The Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to mastectomy, told by the great feminist and activist Audre Lorde. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and essay, Lorde fuses the personal and political to reflect on the many questions breast cancer raises: questions of survival, sexuality, prosthesis and self-care. It is a journey of survival, friendship, and self-acceptance. 
 
Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet. Adrienne Rich 
 
This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me Alice Walker

The Cancer Journals

John Healy

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

'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

Sigmund Freud

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive nature of human desire. 
 
In the famous case study of the eighteen-year-old 'Dora', we see Freud at work, both putting into practice and testing his sexual theories that were to change the modern world.

The Psychology of Love

Georges Bataille

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.

Eroticism

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

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story' 
 
James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom. 
 
'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post 
 
'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian 
 
'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Notes of a Native Son

Azar Nafisi

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. 
 
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, left behind by her older sisters. On she stumbles through teenage hardships -- suicide, abortion, hunger, a Christmas spent alone -- until she emerges into happiness: an oasis of friendship in Washington Heights, an affair in a dirty factory in Connecticut, and, finally, a journey down to the heat of Mexico, discovering sex, tenderness, and suppers of hot tamales and cold milk. This is Audre Lorde's story. It is a rapturous, life-affirming tale of independence, love, work, strength, sexuality and change, rich with poetry and fierce emotional power.

Zami

A New Spelling of my Name

Carlo Levi

'We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.' Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort or solace, where, eternally patient, the peasants lived in an age-old stillness and in the presence of death - for Christ did stop at Eboli.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Gregor Rezzori

The Snows of Yesteryear (1989) is Gregor von Rezzori's haunting evocation of his childhood in Czernowitz, in present-day Ukraine. Growing up after the First World War, Rezzori portrays a twilit world suspended between the dying ways of an imperial past and the terrors of the twentieth century. He recalls his volatile, boar-hunting father, his earthy nursemaid, his fragile, aristocratic mother, his adored governess and the tragic death of his beloved sister, in a luminous story of war, unrest, eccentricity, folk tales, dark forests, night flights, and what it is like to lose your home.

The Snows of Yesteryear

Portraits for an Autobiography

John Steinbeck

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now  Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document.  Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II.  This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle

A Russian Journal

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Lolly Willowes, always so gentle and accommodating, suddenly announces that she is moving, alone, to the countryside. To her overbearing family in London, it is a disturbing and inexplicable act of defiance. But Lolly will not be swayed, and in the depths of the English countryside she gradually discovers not only freedom and independence, but also, unexpectedly, her true vocation: witchcraft.

Lolly Willowes

Penguin Modern Classics

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent 
 
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 
 
'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 
 
'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Nobody Knows My Name

More Notes Of A Native Son

William Yeats

This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats&rsquo;s published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats&rsquo;s essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth

George Orwell

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 
 
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' 
 
Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward' 
 
'In late 1951, Guevara and Alberto Granado set off on the 500cc Norton they nicknamed La Poderosa ('The Powerful One') with no other agenda than a lust for life and a desire to see it all. The Motorcycle Diaries offer a unique perspective on what led this would-be doctor from relatively affluent Argentina to become one of the 20th century's most important political figures ... genuinely exhilarating' Guardian 
 
'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

The Motorcycle Diaries

Shiva Naipaul

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what 'liberation', 'revolution' and 'socialism' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

North of South

An African Journey

Virginia M. Axline

In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the room, defying approach and every attempt at interaction. Every day was like this, and every day his teachers feared further that their support was not enough. As a last resort, Axline was asked to meet with Dibs for a series of weekly play therapy sessions. There, through the guise of time spent will toys and paint, Dibs' extraordinary character -- and the circumstance of his pain -- is slowly revealed... 
 
Based on the transcripts of their sessions together, Dibs in Search of Self is a seminal testament to the power of psychotherapy, and a classic of twentieth century nonfiction -- an incredible true story of personal transformation.

Dibs in Search of Self

Personality Development in Play Therapy

Silvia Federici

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Caliban and the Witch

Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, but she has no idea of the struggles that lie ahead - love affairs, an unwanted pregnancy, physical pain and crippling opioid addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living life freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms. 
 
The final volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy and perhaps her masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Dependency

The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Socialism and the English Genius

Aimé Césaire

'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself. 
 
'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton 
'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre 
'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent

Return to My Native Land

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

'The play of moonlight on the icebergs was indescribably strange, and its magnificent refracted shimmers were brighter than day. One night, fooled by its brilliance, I got up at three in the morning.' 
 
Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Kpomassie grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When, as a teenager, he discovered a book on Greenland, this distant land of snow and ice became an instant obsession and he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. 
 
In this work of rich, immersive travel writing Kpomassie invites the reader to join him on his audacious journey as he makes his way from the Equator to the bitter cold of the Arctic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation, this warm, captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and colonization. 
 
Originally published in 1981, this critically acclaimed work has been translated into nine languages and is a rare example of travel writing from a West African perspective that highlights unexpected connection between cultures despite their contrasting landscapes. 
 
This translation by James Kirkup has previously been published with the title An African in Greenland

Michel the Giant

An African in Greenland

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep 
 
The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. 
 
'The truth of her writing is as necessary today as it's ever been' Guardian

Sister Outsider

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Tristes Tropiques

Sam Selvon

Set in London in 1965, The Housing Lark follows a group of West Indian friends as they attempt to buy a house together in the city they now call home, while also navigating racist attitudes, sexual politics, exploitative landlords and brushes with the law. Written with Selvon's characteristic exuberance and humour, this is a vivid and moving depiction of the migrant experience, peopled by a compelling cast of schemers, dreamers and hustlers.

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