Art
The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
Hughes charts the story of modern
art, from cubism to the avant garde
The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
The most popular art book in
history. Gombrich
examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the
dawn of time
Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
A study of the ways in which we look
at art, which changed the terms of a generation's engagement with visual
culture
Biography
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
Biography mixes with anecdote in
this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the
Renaissance
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
Boswell draws on his
journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
"Blessed be God, at the end
of the last year I was in very good health," begins this extraordinarily vivid
diary of the Restoration period
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Strachey set the template for
modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian
heroes
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Graves' autobiography tells the
story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the
book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world
war
The Autobiography of Alice B
Toklas by Gertrude Stein
(1933)
Stein's groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an
autobiography, of her lover
Culture
Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Sontag's proposition that the modern
sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual
aesthetics
Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Barthes gets under the surface of
the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of
contemporary myth-making
Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
Said argues that romanticised western
representations of Arab culture are political and condescending
Environment
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
This account of the effects of
pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the
US
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Lovelock's argument that once life
is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival,
revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things
History
The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
History begins with Herodotus's
account of the Greco-Persian war
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire by Edward Gibbon
(1776)
The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient
sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable
The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
A landmark study from
the pre-eminent Whig historian
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
Arendt's reports on the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of
the Holocaust
The Making of the English Working
Class by EP Thompson
(1963)
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political
agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous
masses
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
A moving account of the
treatment of Native Americans by the US government
Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great
Depression by Studs Terkel
(1970)
Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful
tapestry
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The great Polish reporter
tells the story of the last Shah of Iran
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm
(1994)
Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in
this account of the 20th century
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed
with Our Familes by Philip
Gourevitch (1999)
Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and
the failures of the international community
Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
A magisterial account of the grand
sweep of European history since 1945
Journalism
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
An examination of the moral
dilemmas at the heart of the journalist's trade
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
(1968)
The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry
Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD
Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
A vivid account of Herr's
experiences of the Vietnam war
Literature
The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Biographical and critical studies
of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and
works
An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
Achebe challenges western cultural
imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which
deprives its African characters of humanity
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
Bettelheim argues that the
darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their
fears
Mathematics
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
(1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores
formal complexity and self-reference
Memoir
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau establishes the
template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own
life
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave by Frederick Douglass
(1845)
This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice
of the slave was heard in mainstream society
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde
tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual
development
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of
Lawrence's exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire
The Story of My Experiments with
Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
(1927)
A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles
and his passionate quest for self-knowledge
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
Orwell's clear-eyed account of his
experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the
civil war
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Published by her father after
the war, this account of the family's hidden life helped to shape the post-war
narrative of the Holocaust
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Nabokov reflects on his life
before moving to the US in 1940
The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
A powerful autobiographical account
of Soyinka's experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author's life,
including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope
of chemistry
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Sage demolishes the fantasy of family
as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the
generations
Mind
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
Freud's argument that our
experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the
discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture
Music
The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Rosen examines how 19th-century
composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with
literature, landscape and the divine
Philosophy
The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
A lively dinner-party debate on the
nature of love
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections,
advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation
of a cosmic perspective
Essays
by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Montaigne's wise, amusing examination of
himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Burton examines all human
culture through the lens of melancholy
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Doubting everything but his
own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe
Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion by David Hume
(1779)
Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining
arguments for the existence of God
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
If western philosophy is merely a
footnote to Plato, then Kant's attempt to unite reason with experience provides
many of the subject headings
Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Hegel takes the reader through the
evolution of consciousness
Walden
by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin,
which examines ideas of independence and society
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Mill argues that "the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a
civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others"
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche
proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
(1962)
A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific
progress
Politics
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
A study of warfare that stresses the
importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing
circumstances
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism
into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon
virtue to defend stability
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Hobbes makes the case for absolute
power, to prevent life from being "nasty, brutish and short"
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A hugely influential defence of the
French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not
defend the rights of citizens
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in
order that they might contribute to society
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
An analysis of
society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with
the ringing declaration that "proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains"
The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
A series of essays makes the case for
equality in the American south
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
De Beauvoir examines what it
means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to
men throughout history
The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
An exploration of the
psychological impact of colonialisation
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic
popularisation of McLuhan's ideas about technology and culture was cocreated
with Quentin Fiore
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Greer argues that male society
represses the sexuality of women
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Chomsky argues
that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise
their profits
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
A vibrant first history of the
ongoing social media revolution
Religion
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
An attempt to identify the
shared elements of the world's religions, which suggests that they originate
from fertility cults
The Varieties of Religious
Experience by William James
(1902)
James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in
terms of their origin or empirical accuracy
Science
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin's account of the evolution
of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the
universe
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
An elegant exploration of
physical theories from one of the 20th century's greatest
theoreticians
The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
James Watson's personal account of
how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
Dawkins launches a revolution in
biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of
the gene, rather than the organism
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
A book owned by 10 million
people, if understood by fewer, Hawking's account of the origins of the universe
became a publishing sensation
Society
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
A defence of womankind
in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout
history
Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
This satirical encomium to the
foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and
corruption in the Catholic church
Letters Concerning the English
Nation by Voltaire
(1734)
Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it
affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel
Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
An investigation into protestant
and catholic culture, which argues that the more vigilant social control within
catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide
Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A thorough analysis of political,
economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the
template for modern sociology
A Room of one's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Woolf's extended essay argues for
both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated
literary tradition
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
Evans's images
and Agee's words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US
South
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
An exploration of the unhappiness
felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and
stable family lives
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
A novelistic account of a brutal
murder in a town in Kansas, which propelled Capote to fame and
fortune
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
Didion evokes life in 1960s
California in a series of sparkling essays
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
This analysis of
incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author's own experiences as a
zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
Foucault examines the development
of modern society's systems of incarceration
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
Colombia's greatest
20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo
Escobar's Medellín cartel
Travel
The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
The Arab world's greatest
medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world
and beyond
Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Twain's tongue-in-cheek account of his
European adventures was an immediate bestseller
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
A six-week trip to Yugoslavia
provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history
Venice
by Jan Morris (1960)
An eccentric but learned guide to the great city's art,
history, culture and people
A Time of Gifts
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
(1977)
The first volume of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot through Europe - a
glowing evocation of youth, memory and history
Danube
by Claudio Magris (1986)
Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and
literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea
China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
A pioneering work of Chinese
sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a
melancholy meditation on transience and decay
Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on
a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic
imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way
Letters to a Young
Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
Vargas Llosa distils a
lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer's
craft
What have we missed? Help fill in the gaps and join the debate on the blog
• This article was amended on 18 July 2011. The original entry for Truman Capote's In Cold Blood referred to an account of a brutal murder in Kansas city. This has been corrected. The article was further amended on 27 November 2012. The original said Durkheim argued that less vigilant social control within catholic societies lowered the rate of suicide. This has been corrected.