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Abridged and with an Introduction by Antony Lentin and Brian Norman. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, is the undisputed masterpiece of English historical writing which can only perish with the language itself. Its length alone is a measure of its monumental quality: seventy-one chapters, of which twenty-eight… Read More

Translated by Yuan Shibing and J.J.L.Duyvendak. With introductions by Robert Wilkinson. The two political classics in this book are the product of a time of intense turmoil in Chinese history. Dating from the Period of the Warring States (403-221BC), they anticipate Machiavelli’s The Prince by nearly 2000 years. The Art of War is the best… Read More

Contents: The Communist Manifesto; The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific With an introduction by Dr. Laurence Marlow. A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx’s prediction that the state would wither away… Read More

Translated by W.H.White and A.K.Stirling. With an Introduction by Don Garrett. Benedict de Spinoza lived a life of blameless simplicity as a lens-grinder in Holland. And yet in his lifetime he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a heretic, and after his death his works were first banned by the Christian authorities… Read More

Translated with Notes by Arthur Waley. With an Introduction by Robert Wilkinson. Dating from around 300BC, Tao Te Ching is the first great classic of the Chinese school of philosophy called Taoism. Within its pages is summed up a complete view of the cosmos and how human beings should respond to it. A profound mystical… Read More

Translated by Thomas Common. With an Introduction by Nicholas Davey. This astonishing series of aphorisms, put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, contains the kernel of Nietzsche’s thought. ‘God is dead’, he tells us. Christianity is decadent, leading mankind into a slave morality concerned not with this life, but with the next. Nietzsche… Read More

Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. With an Introduction by Ray Furness. The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche’s last lucid months, show him at his most stimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Übermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate,… Read More

Translated by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan. With an Introduction by Stephen Watt. The ideas of Plato (c429-347BC) have influenced Western philosophers for over two thousand years. Such is his importance that the twentieth-century philosopher A.N. Whitehead described all subsequent developments within the subject as foot-notes to Plato’s work. Beyond philosophy, he has… Read More