Latest posts
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Herodotus: The Father of History — and of the Tall Tale
Cicero called him the Father of History; his critics call him the Father of Lies. Why Herodotus, the first man to inquire into the past, is still the most human of the ancients.
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The Importance of Being Earnest: The Funniest Play in English
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Wilde’s masterpiece is the funniest play in English — and, under the sparkle, one of the most quietly subversive works of its age.
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Civil Disobedience: The Essay That Armed the Conscience
Thoreau spent a night in jail rather than pay a tax to a government that waged unjust war and upheld slavery — and wrote the essay that would arm Gandhi, King, and every conscience that ever defied an unjust law.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Birth of the Modern Novel of the Self
Joyce tells the story of a soul waking up — from a baby’s first words to a young man’s decision to become an artist — in a prose that grows up with its hero. It is the bridge between the old novel and the new.
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The Prince: The Most Dangerous Book Ever Written
For five centuries it has been called wicked, cynical, and dangerous. Machiavelli’s little handbook for rulers is really something more unsettling: the first honest account of how power actually works.
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Hume’s History of England: The Philosopher as Historian
Before he was revered as the greatest British philosopher, David Hume was famous across Europe as a historian — the author of the calm, skeptical, magnificently readable History of England.
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Rome and the Barbarians: Tacitus and the Mirror of Empire
The greatest Roman historian described the free, fierce German tribes beyond the frontier — and used them to hold a mirror up to the corruption of Rome itself.
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The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The Greatest History Ever Written
Edward Gibbon spent twenty years chronicling how the mightiest empire in history rotted and collapsed — and wrote, in the process, the greatest work of history in the English language.
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Kidnapped: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Perfect Adventure
A boy is robbed of his inheritance, sold to a ship, and flung across the Scottish Highlands with a hunted rebel at his side. Stevenson’s masterpiece of adventure is also a subtle study of friendship across a divide.
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The Alienist: Machado de Assis and the Madness of Certainty
A brilliant doctor opens an asylum in a small Brazilian town and begins locking up the mad — and his ever-shifting definition of madness becomes the sharpest satire ever written about science, power, and certainty.