Great Books
Beyond Good and Evil
Two hundred and ninety-six attacks on what a nineteenth-century European thought he knew, written by a sick man alone in a boarding house. It sold a few dozen copies.
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky finished it four months before he died, and he had spent his whole life getting ready to write it.
On the Origin of Species
The most consequential book of the nineteenth century was written by a man who spent twenty years trying not to publish it. It is also far better company than its...
On Liberty
Mill was certain that the real threat to freedom in a modern democracy would not come from the state. It would come from your neighbours.
Communist Manifesto
Thirty pages, written by two young men against a printer's deadline, that went on to redraw the political map of the twentieth century.
Democracy in America
A twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat came to inspect American prisons, stayed nine months, and wrote the best book anyone has written about the United States.