In his witty and perceptive discourses on the ideal virtues of a Renaissance courtiers, Castiglione set out values that continue to offer illumination in questions of leadership and government - espo

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy. Here he sets out his subversive views in a series of aphorisms on subjects ranging from art to arrogance, boredom

Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, material

Francis Bacon's landmark writings on subjects ranging from anger and ambition, marriage and money to envy and empire established him as the founding father of modern scientific thinking, with his rej

The founding father of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, living in an era of horrific violence, saw human life as meaningless and cruel; here, he argues the only way to escape this brutalit

Aprofound consolation to early believers, these two books from the Bible deeply influenced the rise of the Christian church: the apocalyptic Revelation portraying the religion's ultimate triumph over

A profound influence on medieval Europe's view of the wider world, this thirteenth-century account of a Venetian merchant's amazing experiences in the court of the great Mongol leader, Kubilai Khan,

Written after the discovery of over forty Bronze Age burial urns in seventeenth-century Norfolk, Sir Thomas Browne's profound consideration of the inevitability of death remains one of the most fasci