Great Books
The Prince
Twenty-six short chapters, written in a few months by a man who had just been tortured and sacked. Five centuries of denunciation later, we still cannot agree whether it is...
Praise of Folly
The funniest book of the Renaissance was dashed off in a week as a private joke for a friend. Within a decade it had handed half of Europe its vocabulary...
The Divine Comedy
A hundred cantos, written by an exile under sentence of death who never saw his city again. It is the most ambitious poem ever attempted, and the astonishing thing is...
Summa Theologica
Two and a half million words, arranged as a series of questions, each one stating the strongest case against Aquinas before he answers it. Nobody reads it cover to cover....
