Philosophy

One of the most important nineteenth-century schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of an action rests in how well it promotes the welfare of those affected by it, aiming for 'the greatest happiness of the...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close...

This book first appeared in the form of a series of leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, beginning on April 4th, 1849. The text is made up of from lectures delivered by Marx before the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels in 1847.

This is Lenin's seminal text on social revolution and how to achieve it, published some 16 years before Russia's October 1917 Revolution. His plan to overturn the Czar's ruthless autocratic regime proposes the establishment of a cadre of "professional...

A practical guide to making wiser, more informed choices in love.Finding and choosing a partner is one of the most consequential decisions we will ever make. This guide explains everything from why we have "types" and how our early lives inform our...

'Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone.'In these witty, Machiavellian aphorisms, unlikely Spanish priest Baltasar Gracian shows us how to exploit friends and enemies alike to thrive in a world of deception and illusion.Introducing Little Black...

Discover the answers to the questions of God, meaning, and existence. This is the final book of the original three-book Conversations with God series. The series deals with “universal truths of the highest order, and the challenges and...

How to deal with twenty-first century challenges, individually and globally. The Conversations with God books are among the most popular spirituality books published in the past 50 years. They have sold millions of copies in over two dozen languages...

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY is a book without any modern parallel. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's METAMORPHOSES directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's re-exploration of the fantastic fables and mysteries we may...

Otters are some of the most delightful animals on the planet. These long, lean, furry creatures embody pure joy in so many ways – they live for napping, playing, making friends and eating, and forget about the rest. Pretty inspiring, right? In a...

Exuberantly mocking the vices and pretensions of his Roman contemporaries, Horace's Satiresare stuffed full of comic vignettes, moral insights, and his pervasive humanity. Boasting famous episodes such as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse...

A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art.The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects—“the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else,” wrote Italo Calvino when...

Who will inherit the secrets of Sigmund Freud? Who will protect his reputation? Who may destroy it? Janet Malcolm's investigation into the personalities who clash over Freud's legacy has become a celebrated story of seduction and betrayal, love and...

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist explains what happened at the very beginning of the universe, and how we know, in this popular science classic.  Our universe has been growing for nearly 14 billion years. But almost everything about it, from the...

In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees...

Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity...

This is the year you change your life. There's a saying that when the moment comes, you don't need words on a page, you need new thoughts in your head. When the moment really comes when you have to find your courage, when you have to let go, when you...

In the present state of society, it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions,...

From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.This is...