Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

Adrian Gilbert

Adrian Henri

Adrian House

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Tristes Tropiques

Compiled by an unknown scribe in Iceland around 1270, and based on sources dating back centuries earlier, these mythological and heroic poems tell of gods and mortals from an ancient era: the giant-slaying Thor, the doomed Völsung family, the Hel-ride of Brynhild and the cruelty of Atli the Hun. Eclectic, incomplete and fragmented, these verses nevertheless retain their stark beauty and their power to enthrall, opening a window on to the thoughts, beliefs and hopes of the Vikings and their world.

The Elder Edda

A Book of Viking Lore

'Woman, who is equal to the moon in the flower of youth, 
Is equal to a little old ape after the onset of old age' 
 
This remarkable collection brings together a host of writings from across different regions and cultures of the Middle Ages, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. They are arranged to follow the life stages of a Medieval woman living a secular existence, from infancy and girlhood, through marriage and motherhood, to widowhood and old age. Some women are famous or captured in exceptional circumstances, many more are anonymous: an abandoned baby in Italy, or an epitaph for the female leader of a Synagogue, speaking across the ages. 
 
This selection contains an introduction discussing the Medieval woman's status, separate introductions to each chapter, notes and a bibliography.

Medieval Writings on Secular Women

Kakuzo Okakura

For a generation adjusting painfully to the demands of a modern industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an alternative vision of the good life: aesthetically austere, socially aristocratic, and imbued with spirituality. The Book of Tea was originally written in English and sought to address the inchoate yearnings of disaffected Westerners. In a flash of inspiration, Okakura saw that the formal tea party as practiced in New England was a distant cousin of the Japanese tea ceremony, and that East and West had thus "met in the tea-cup."

The Book of Tea

Penguin Classics

Chinua Achebe

Beautifully written yet highly controversial, An Image of Africa asserts Achebe's belief in Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and his conviction that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness only serves to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black people. Also included is The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe's searing outpouring of his frustrations with his country. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

An Image of Africa

Gregor Rezzori

The Snows of Yesteryear (1989) is Gregor von Rezzori's haunting evocation of his childhood in Czernowitz, in present-day Ukraine. Growing up after the First World War, Rezzori portrays a twilit world suspended between the dying ways of an imperial past and the terrors of the twentieth century. He recalls his volatile, boar-hunting father, his earthy nursemaid, his fragile, aristocratic mother, his adored governess and the tragic death of his beloved sister, in a luminous story of war, unrest, eccentricity, folk tales, dark forests, night flights, and what it is like to lose your home.

The Snows of Yesteryear

Portraits for an Autobiography

Friedrich Engels

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), was a provocative and profoundly influential critique of the Victorian nuclear family. Engels argued that the traditional monogamous household was in fact a recent construct, closely bound up with capitalist societies. Under this patriarchal system, women were servants and, effectively, prostitutes. Only Communism would herald the dawn of communal living and a new sexual freedom and, in turn, the role of the state would become superfluous.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

'Perpetua shouted out with joy as the sword pierced her, for she wanted to taste some of the pain and she even guided the hesitant hand of the trainee gladiator towards her own throat' 
 
Lives of Roman Christian Women is a unique collection of letters and documents from the third to the fifth centuries, celebrating Christian women from across the Roman Empire. During a crucial period in which Christianity transformed from a persecuted faith to the official religion of the Empire, these writings reveal the women who chose to dedicate their lives to Christ, by embracing martyrdom or by adopting a life of poverty and prayer, renouncing not only wealth but also their duties as wives and mothers.

Lives of Roman Christian Women

Tacitus

The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola - the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law - and the first detailed account of Britain that has come down to us. It offers fascinating descriptions of the geography, climate and peoples of the country, and a succinct account of the early stages of the Roman occupation, nearly fatally undermined by Boudicca's revolt in AD 61 but consolidated by campaigns that took Agricola as far as Anglesey and northern Scotland. The warlike German tribes are the focus of Tacitus' attention in the Germania, which, like the Agricola, often compares the behaviour of 'barbarian' peoples favourably with the decadence and corruption of Imperial Rome.

Agricola and Germania

Richard Hoggart

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? 
 
When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

The Uses of Literacy

Aspects of Working-Class Life

Thomas Hardy

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Susan Sontag

Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor in 1978, while suffering from breast cancer herself. In her study she reveals that the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of the patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - a disease; not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment, and highly curable, if good treatment is found early enough. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote Aids and Its Metaphors, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

Italo Calvino

Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a fascinating and rich addition to folk literature.

Italian Folktales

Written when Engels was only twenty-four, and inspired in particular by his time living amongst the poor in Manchester, this forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers--depicting overcrowded housing, abject poverty, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness--in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. His fascinating later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years' further refelection. A masterpiece of committed reporting and an impassioned call to arms, this is one of the great pioneering works of social history.

The Condition of the Working Class in England

The Tain Bo Cualinge, centrepiece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's great epic. It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, Queen and King of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cualige. The hero of the tale is Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who resists the invaders single-handed while Ulster's warriors lie sick.

The Tain

Marshall McLuhan

Well known for coining the term 'Global Village', Marshall McLuhan's thinking was, and still is, revolutionary. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This is an astonishing work by a truly astonishing man. 
 
The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. This is one of four books in that series.

The Medium is the Massage

An Inventory of Effects

John Healy

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

Usama ibn Munqidh

The volume comprises lightly annotated translation of a key medieval Arabic text that bears directly on the Crusades and Crusader society and the Muslim experience of them.

The Book of Contemplation

Islam and the Crusades

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature. The owner of the café where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry socialist drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways the could never imagine. Moving, sensitive and deeply humane, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores loneliness, the human need for understanding and the search for love.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin witnessed the excesses of the Russian Revolution as a child, and in becoming one of the key liberal intellects of the last century some of his most important contributions were on the subject of Russia and the concept of freedom. In the ten essays gathered here, Berlin addresses the great Russian minds of the nineteenth century: Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky and Tolstoy, as well as exploring the political and social revolutions they inspired and responded to. Berlin himself describes this extraordinary outpouring as &lsquo;the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world&rsquo;.

Russian Thinkers

Gregory Claeys

Robert Owen

In his early works Owen argues that, since individuals are wholly formed by their environment, education is the crucial factor in transforming them. Later he came to adopt far more radical positions, proposing nothing less than 'the emancipation ofmankind' and the creation of a 'new moral world', a full-scale reorganization of British society, major reforms of working practices and the Poor Laws and the establishment of co-operative model.

A New View of Society and Other Writings

Robert Lekachman

Thorsten Veblen

Thorstein Veblen

This classic of economic thought is a scathing critique of American snobbery and wastefulness. Chief among the practices that Veblen so wittily satirizes is &quot;conspicuous consumption&quot;, a pattern of behaviour that still flourishes among us.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

Simhasana Dvatrimsika

The fabled monarch Vikramaditya is considered to be a model of kingly virtues, and his reign a golden age of peace and prosperity. Narrated by the thirty-two statuettes of nymphs supporting his magic throne, the Tales describe his exploits and extol his extraordinary courage, compassion and kindness. Against an exotic setting of adventures and miracles, they depict such fantastical elements as fights with ogres, occult rituals and travels to other world, as well as very human situations of betrayal and rivalry. Dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, these colourful Tales are an intriguing mix of marvellous happenings, proverbial wisdom and sage precepts that entertain even as they instruct.

Thirty-two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya

Michael Young

Peter Willmott

Although housing in Bethnal Green was often appalling, a complex network of relatives - families of three generations held together by the powerful mother-daughter bond at the centre - was always available to provide mutual aid and a sense of community. It was when families were rehoused in the immaculate new estates outside London, miles away from their kin, that the vital support system broke down, with disastrous effects on the quality of people's lives. 
 
This famous book, based on a major three-year research project, makes clear how planners have frequently failed to understand real human needs; it also provides a marvellous portrait of the resilience and generosity of spirit which went at least some way to compensate for the deptivations of inner-city working-class life.

Family and Kinship in East London

Carol Tully

The four works collected in this volume reveal the fascinating preoccupations of the German Romantic movement, which revelled in the inexplicable, the uncanny and the unknown and, especially, the mysterious world of the fairy tale. Goethe's richly imaginative Fairy Tale (1795) depicts an ethereal underground realm and the marriage of a beautiful man and woman, whose union heralds a new age. In Tieck's Eckbert the Fair (1797) two outsiders seek refuge in the solitude of dark woods to conceal their incestuous passion from the world, while in Fouque's Undine (1811) a water nymph falls in love and acquires a soul, and so discovers the reality of human suffering. And Brentano's Tale of Honest Casper and Fair Annie (1817) portrays the tragedy of a young couple, destroyed by a false sense of honour and pride.

Romantic Fairy Tales

Mir Amman

In despair at having no son to succeed him, the King of Turkey leaves his palace to live in seclusion. Soon after, however, he encounters four wandering dervishes - three princes and a rich merchant from Persia, Yemen and China - who have been guided to Turkey by a supernatural force that prophesied their meeting. The five men sit together in the dead of night, each in turn telling the tale of lost love that led him to renounce the world. As their stories within stories unfold, a magnificent world is revealed of courtly intrigue and romance, fairies and djinn, oriental gardens and lavish feasts, adventures and mishaps. A Tale of Four Dervishes (1803) is an exquisite example of Urdu fiction that provides a fascinating glimpse into the customs, beliefs and people of the time.

A Tale of Four Dervishes

Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim's On Suicide (1897) was a groundbreaking book in the field of sociology. Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a matter of purely individual despair but Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed that if anything can explain how individuals relate to society, then it is suicide: Why does it happen? What goes wrong? Why do certain social, religious or racial groups have higher incidences of suicide than others? As Durkheim explored these questions he became convinced that abnormally high or low levels of social integration lead to an increased likelihood of suicide. On Suicide was the result of his extensive research. Divided into three parts - individual reasons for suicide, social forms of suicide and the relation of suicide to society as a whole - Durkheim's revelations have fascinated, challenged and informed readers for over a century.

On Suicide

John Stuart Mill

A prodigiously brilliant thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age, the political and social radical John Stuart Mill was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century. Regarded as one of the sacred texts of liberalism, his great work On Liberty argues lucidly that any democracy risks becoming a 'tyranny of opinion' in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform with those of the majority. Written in the same period as On Liberty, shortly after the death of Mill's beloved wife and fellow-thinker Harriet, The Subjection of Women stresses the importance of equality for the sexes. Together, the works provide a fascinating testimony to the hopes and anxieties of mid-Victorian England, and offer a compelling consideration of what it truly means to be free.

On Liberty and the Subjection of Women

Sivadasa

Half mythical, heroic and sagacious, the emperor Vikramaditya is widely regarded as India's greatest monarch. This collection of stories tells of the ruler's fabled encounter with a vetala, a genie who inhabits the body of a corpse. The emperor begs the spirit for his help against a mighty necromancer and is told in return twenty-four tales, each of which presents a situation he might face as a king and culminates in a riddle that he must solve. With each answer, Vikramaditya displays his deep wisdom, proving himself to be the ideal monarch and winning, in the twenty-fifth tale, the guidance he needs from the vetala to destroy his powerful enemy. Written down in medieval times but inspired by an oral tradition stretching back centuries, these wise and witty tales rank amongst the great masterpieces of Sanskrit literature.

The Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie

Visnu Sarma

First recorded 1500 years ago, but taking its origins from a far earlier oral tradition, the Pancatantra is ascribed by legend to the celebrated, half-mythical teacher Visnu Sarma. Asked by a great king to awaken the dulled intelligence of his three idle sons, the aging Sarma is said to have composed the great work as a series of entertaining and edifying fables narrated by a wide range of humans and animals, and together intended to provide the young princes with vital guidance for life. Since first leaving India before AD 570, the Pancatantra has been widely translated and has influenced a cast number of works in India, the Arab world and Europe, including the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales and the Fables of La Fontaine. Enduring and profound, it is among the earliest and most popular of all books of fables.

The Pancatantra

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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