Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Albert Camus

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Tacitus

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Tacitus was the greatest historian of the Roman empire. Born in about AD 55, he served as administrator and leading senator. This career gave him an intimate view of the empire at its highest levels, experience brought to bear on his writing. 
His major works are the Annals and the Histories, both of which have come down to us incomplete. Between them, they cover a period of about 80 years, from the death of the first emperor, Augustus, to the death of Domitian in 96AD. In addition, Tacitus also composed two short historical books or essays, the Agricola (about his father-in-law, a distinguished provincial governor) and the Germania, an account of the tribes beyond the Rhine. 
Tacitus is a brilliant narrator and master stylist who had ample material for his story in the dramatic, violent and often bloody events of the first century. His portraits - especially those of Tiberius, Nero, and Nero's immediate circle - are unforgettable, his scene-setting masterly, his psychological analysis as acute as any novelist. He is also a fierce critic of the decadence and corruption which marked struggles for the imperial succession. As Robin Lane Fox writes in his brilliant introduction, 'Above all Tacitus was supremely wary of the distortions and "spin" of official announcements. He had no illusions about the capacities of presidential, one-man rule.' Napoleon disliked him, not surprisingly. 
Everyman reprints the classic translation by A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, with extensive notes considerably revised and updated by Dr Eleanor Cowan.

Annals and Histories

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin’s account of his rise from poverty and obscurity to affluence and fame is a self-portrait of a quintessential American which has charmed every generation of readers since it first appeared in 1791. Begun as a collection of anecdotes for his son, the memoir grew into a history of his remarkable achievements in the literary, scientific and political realms. A printer, inventor, scientist, diplomat and statesman, Franklin was also a brilliant writer whose wit and wisdom shine on every page. 
Franklin was a remarkably prolific author, well known in his lifetime for his humorous, philosophical, parodic and satirical writings, and for the parables and maxims which he published under an astonishing number of pen names, including Poor Richard, the Busy-Body, and Silence Dogood. This Everyman edition contains a varied selection of these, including 'The Kite Experiment', 'A Parable Against Persecution', 'Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind', 'Rules for Making Oneself a Disagreeable Companion' and 'The Way to Wealth'.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the worshipper and frequenter of the great men of his time, the 'divine' Michelangelo, who came to his studio, the 'marvellous' Titian (the adjectives are Cellini's ). He loathed the sculptor Torregiano because he had broken Michelangelo's nose.His autobiography gives a quite extraordinarily vivid account of daily life in Renaissance Florence and Rome, its studios, its taverns, its violence, his loves, the kings, cardinals and popes who commission his works. At 27 he helps direct the defence of the castello San Angelo; his account of his imprisonment there under a mad castellan (who thought he was a bat), his escape by an improvised rope, his recapture, his confinement in 'a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms' is a chapter of adventure equal to any in fact or fiction. Later he describes burning all his furniture to achieve sufficient heat to cast of one of his most famous works, Perseus and the Head of Medusa. 
Cellini's Life was translated by Goethe into German. The Everyman translation by Anne Macdonell (1903) is widely recognised as the most faithful to the energy and spirit of the original.

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Mark Twain

Politics, religion, culture, travel, science and technology, family life: nothing escaped the eye and pen of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, nineteenth-century America's most famous writer and a legend in his own lifetime. Though chiefly known today for his classic novels of childhood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his short stories, he produced even more nonfiction of an impressive quality. 
 
Twain lived a life as exciting as his fiction, and in his Autobiography we find him running wild, like the heroes of his novels, in the countryside around his childhood home in Missouri and navigating the treacherous waters of the Mississippi River as a trained steamboat pilot, while his letters show him travelling thousands of miles over the United States on hectic lecture tours (he was a great showman, raconteur and performer of his own works), hobnobbing with princes and presidents and being lionized in the capitals of Europe. 
 
His trademark wit, candour, sarcasm and irrepressible humour shine through on every page of this selection, but here too, beyond the entertainer, we discover in his speeches and essays the social and moral issues - slavery, imperialism - which concerned him, and meet the private man behind that towering public figure, whose long marriage never lost its romance, but who bore the sorrow of losing two of his three daughters while still in their twenties. 
 
A sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious and always riveting read.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 1

Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches

John Evelyn

Sometimes overshadowed by his friend and contemporary, Samuel Pepys, Evelyn is the other great English diarist. He was a scholar, a scientific amateur, a garden designer and architect, and a founder member of the Royal Society who published a magisterial book about trees, Sylva, and many pamphlets on assorted subjects. 
His great interest as a diarist is that he was privy to all the great men and events of his very long life, from the execution of Charles I to the accession of Queen Anne, whereas Pepys writes of a relatively short period. A personal friend of Charles II, he observed at close quarters- and with some disapproval- that monarch's amorous life, and the diaries contain vivid portraits of Nell Gwynn, other royal mistresses and their children. The personalities of James II, the Dukes of Monmouth and Marlborough, and Judge Jeffreys, also figure largely. 
But this is more than a social record. As a valued administrator, Evelyn was also involved with many serious projects, such as combating the Plague, and rebuilding London after the Great Fire - an enterprise which brought him close to Christopher Wren. 
In all, a vivid portrait of the social, personal and political life of a society in ferment by one of its major players.

The Diary of John Evelyn

Boswell James

The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen more. At the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson, who towers above them all. Yet this is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero's humbler friends in a picture which is, before all things, humane. This is a new, corrected, rest and reprinted edition. At 14. 99 for the complete edition of the Life in 1344 pages, it compares with Penguin's abridged edition of just 300 pages of text at 6. 99 and OUP's World Classics unabridged edition printed on newsprint at 10. 99.

The Life Of Samuel Johnson

Oscar Wilde

Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde's belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works include Wilde's once-controversial and now classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the riotously comic plays &quot;The Importance of Being Earnest&quot; and &quot;Lady Windermere's Fan,&quot; and the famous poem he wrote after being released from prison, &quot;The Ballad of Reading Gaol.&quot; This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of Wilde's moving letter from prison, De Profundis, and his teasing parable about Shakespeare, &quot;The Portrait of Mr. W. H.&quot; Other notable included writings are the semi-comic mystery story &quot;Lord Arthur's Savile's Crime&quot; and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Plays, Prose Writings And Poems

Giorgio Vasari

The painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was a pupil of Michaelangelo who worked mainly in Florence and Rome. He is famous today, however, as the author of LIVES OF THE PAINTERS, SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS, the work which effectively founded the study of art history and remains one of its greatest monuments. Vasari's distinctive blend of biography and criticism has exerted an immeasurable influence on all subsequent historians, but its value for contemporary readers consists as much in the liveliness and piquancy of the stories his book contains, and the vivid light it casts on the great masters of early Italian painting.

Lives of the Painters Boxed Set

Plato

It has been said that, after the Bible, Plato's dialogues are the most influential books in Western culture. And of the dialogues, the Symposium is the most delightful and accessible, requiring no special knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy or customs. Dramatizing a party in fifth-century B.C. Athens, the deceptively unassuming Symposium introduces--in the guise of convivial after-dinner conversation--profound ideas about the nature of love. In Phaedrus, here published together with the Symposium, Plato discusses the place of eloquence in expounding truth. In both dialogues, Socrates plays the leading role, by turns teasing, arguing, analyzing, joking, inspiring, and cajoling his followers into understanding ideas that have remained central to Western thought through the centuries.

Symposium

Giacomo Casanova

The name of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-1798), in now synonymous with amorous exploits, and there are plenty of these, vividly narrated, in him memoirs. But Casanova was not just an energetic lover. In his time he was diplomat, business man, trainee priest, traveller, prisoner, magician, confidence trickster, gambler, professional entertainer and chalatan. He financed business projects, organised lotteries, wrote opera libretti and dabbled in high politics. Above all he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance and subtlety who left behind him what is probably the most remarkable confession ever written. Casanova was a Venetian who explored to the full all the possibilities 18th century Venice offered by way of love and profit before being imprisoned, escaping from gaol, and fleeing from the city to begin travels which took him across Europe. In Moscow and London, Berlin and Constantinople, he met the famous men and women of the time - Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Louis XV, Rousseau - and recorded his encounters for the memoirs he wrote in retirement at the end of his life. These memoirs are by turns subtle, touching, thrilling, wonderfully comic and quite irresistible. Although the present edition includes one third of Casanova's enormous (though unfinished) book, it contains all his major adventures and all is greatest affairs of the heart. 'Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th century Europe. he ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace.' - V S PRITCHETT

History of My Life

Twain's playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with his real-life adventures, some of them so outrageous they cannot be true - or can they? 
 
As Richard Russo says in his fascinating introduction, Twain was an 'inspired, indeed, unparalleled, bullshitter' who himself cheerfully relates how as a cub reporter out West he had elevated a routine Indian attack on a wagon full of immigrants to a battle that 'to this day has no parallel in history' - once he knew he could get away with it. 
 
There is drama as well as comedy in his account of life on the Mississippi, and great sadness too when his younger brother Henry is killed in a steamboat explosion - all the more poignant for the restraint with which he describes it. In The Innocents Abroad Twain the gleeful iconoclast is a passenger on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land, poking fun at European snobbery and pretension and refusing to be overawed by all that History - but fully prepared to aim his satirical barbs at his fellow-tourists and indeed, squarely at himself. 
 
He also proves to be a deeply compassionate writer, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skilful in mining the humour of human folly. He brought to literature a new, distinctly American voice - and he harboured as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody and define.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 2

Selections from the Memoirs and Travel Writings

Horace Walpole

Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities, and architecture, and to his numerous correspondents he wrote on these and other topics in prose that is celebrated for its charm, eloquence, and wit. This new Everyman's edition offers an extensive selection of Walpole's letters, helpfully arranged by subject so the reader can choose from themes including social life, the Court, politics, literature, and the evolution of his Gothic castle and art and book collections at Strawberry Hill. This edition offers new annotations throughout, with introductions to its various sections and a general introduction on Walpole as a letter writer. In addition, the text of the letters has been corrected and previously excised passages have been restored.

Selected Letters

Samuel Johnson

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson offers a magisterial account of what was then a remote and rugged land, while Boswell throws further light on the friend and mentor whom he immortalized in his biography. Together, they make up a brilliant portrait of two very different and very remarkable men exploring a feudal world which was soon to pass away for ever.

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland & The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

John James Audubon

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

Babur

A lost inheritance, a rags-to-riches journey from vagabondage in the mountains of central Asia to an imperial throne in India, warrior-poet Babur's life was one of adventure and endurance against the odds. Descended from both Genghis Khan and Timur, Babur came to the throne of a small principality at the age of eleven; ten years of warfare later, he would lose it for ever to Uzbek invaders. A lucky break led to the capture of Kabul, from which he carved out a new state for himself in Afghanistan. Just over twenty years later, he was ready for the biggest throw of all - no less than an invasion of India. He recorded his own story pretty much as it happened with startling immediacy and a winning frankness: it was the crowning achievement of a rich tradition of Islamic autobiography. 
There is history and politics here aplenty, but what is most striking about Babur's memoirs is the man they reveal - ambitious but modest and self-critical, deeply attached to friends and family, homesick amongst the treasures of India, sensitive to the beauties of nature and extremely fond of a party. He paints a fascinating portrait of a sophisticated and cultured Persian-Turkic society. As violent for political ends as many a European Renaissance ruler, Babur could order a massacre and return home to write a ghazal. Everywhere he went he created beautiful gardens. There are insights into the role of women in such a society; of Babur's several wives, but particularly the older women of his family, who commanded respect and exercised considerable influence. Four years after his Indian conquest, Babur swore to give his own life if his eldest son recovered from a dangerous illness. Humayun pulled through, and in a few months Babur was dead. But he had laid the foundations of the greatest, wealthiest and most populous of the world's Muslim-ruled empires.

The Babur Nama

Saint Augustine

Augustine’s spiritual autobiography is not only a major document in the history of Christianity and a classic of Roman Africa: it also marks a vital moment in the history of Western culture. As Augustine explains how, when and why he became the man he is at the time of writing, he probes the great themes which others were to explore after him – faith, time, truth, identity and self-understanding – in a detail unmatched in ancient literature. 
 
Illustrated with vivid portraits of friends, family, colleagues and enemies, The Confessions provides a remarkably candid account of the passage from a life of sensuality and superstition to a genuine spiritual awakening. The result is a powerful narrative of one man’s religious journey which continues to shape the way we write and behave today.

The Confessions

Berlioz

Possibly the most colourful figure in the history of Western music, Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was certainly the most eloquent. His autobiography is among the greatest ever written. Larger than life – like his massive works – Berlioz was a seminal figure in the Romantic movement and his book is both a personal testament and an account of his role in that movement. It tells the story of his romance with Harriet Smithson –with whom he fell in love when he saw her playing the part of Ophelia – and his even more passionate affairs with Shakespeare, Scott and Byron. 
 
Familiar with all the great figures of the age – Liszt, Wagner, Balzac, Delacroix, Weber, Rossini – Berlioz paints brilliant and often mordant portraits of them in a style which is one of the glories of French prose. Above all, this is the intimate and detailed self-revelation of a complex and attractive man, driven by his creative urges to a position of lonely eminence. 
 
The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz were translated some years ago by David Cairns now famous himself as the composer’s finest biographer. For the Everyman edition he has completely revised the text, and the extensive notes which accompany it, to take account of the latest research.

The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz

Lord Byron

In Lord Byron's lifetime, details of his travels were widely known through poems set in different countries, ranging from his homes in Scotland and England, through Europe and the Middle East, to the South Pacific and into extra-terrestrial realms. At the same time, a much more personal story was being shared with friends and family. Even when divided from those whose company he most enjoyed, Byron continued to share his thoughts and feelings about wherever he happened to be. His compulsive letter-writing reveals a strong desire to reach across space, to connect and reconnect with those elsewhere. While his memoirs did not survive the ceremonial posthumous bonfire at 50 Albemarle Street, many of Byron's correspondents treasured every word in their possession. This means a remarkable legacy has been preserved in letters that still seem as alive with conversational energy as when they were dashed off more than two hundred years ago. Through Byron's letters and journals, we are still able to become mental travellers, transported across time and space by this brilliant, mercurial, magnificent and often maddening writer.

Byron's Travels

Henry David Thoreau

In this classic of American literature, Thoreau gives an account of his two years’ experience of the ‘simple life’ in the woods, telling how he sought and found material and spiritual sustenance in the solitude of the cabin which he built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.

Walden

Edmund Burke

Amid the 18th century’s golden generation that included his companions Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, Burke’s controversial mixture of conservative and subversive theories made him first a marginal figure, and finally a revered theorist – a hero of the Romantics. He warned of the effects of British rule in Ireland, the loss of the American colonies, and most famously, he foresaw the disastrous consequences of revolution in France. This he predicted, would trigger extremism, terror and the atomisation of society – a profound analysis that continues to resonate today. 
 
In this absorbing new biography Conservative MP Jesse Norman gives us Burke anew, vividly depicting his dazzling intellect, imagination and empathy against the rich tapestry of 18th century Europe. Burke’s wisdom, Norman shows, applies well beyond the times of empire to the conventional democratic politics practised in Britain and America today. 
 
We cannot understand the defects of the modern world, or modern politics, without him.

Reflections on The Revolution in France And Other Writings

John Ruskin

To call Praeterita an autobiography is to tell only part of the truth. A book like no other, by oneof the greatest masters of English prose., it is less a narrative than the prismatic sotry of an extraordinary mind and a passionate heart told in terms of the author's aesthetic education. Ruskin was not merely the most important anglophone art critic and social commentator of the late nineteenth century: for his admirers - who included Proust - he was a Tolstoyan figure with the magic of an artist and the moral authority of a sage. Yet above all he was loved as a personality by friends and readers alilke, and it is the individual human qualitites which shine through the mercurial pages of Praeterita

Praeterita And Dilecta

Michel de Montaigne

Describing his collection of Essays as ‘a book consubstantial with its author’, Montaigne identified both the power and the charm of a work which introduces us to one of the most attractive figures in European literature. A humanist, a sceptic, an acute observer of himself and others, he reflects the great themes of existence through the prism of his own self-consciousness. Apparent in every line he wrote, his virtues of tolerance, moderation and disinterested inquiry amount to an undeclared manifesto for the Enlightenment, whose prophet he is. This complete edition of his works supplements the Essays with travel diaries and letters, thereby completing the portrait of a true Renaissance man.

The Complete Works

Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

John Muir

This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays also included here--helped galvanize American naturalists, leading to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

Selected Writings

Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161 and Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. With a profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus provides insights, wisdom, and practical guidance on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity to interacting with others. Consequently, the Meditations have become required reading for statesmen and philosophers alike, while generations of ordinary readers have responded to the straightforward intimacy of his style.

Meditations

Thomas Paine

Tom Paine is celebrated for the part he played in both the American and French Revolutions. Though an Englishman by birth, he reacted violently against the political order of eighteenth-century England and in favour of radical reform. So well thought of was he outside Great Britain that he became a distinguished public figure in both France and the United States. RIGHTS OF MAN and COMMON SENSE are the two short books in which he elaborates his political and social theories in vivid, simple prose which can still be read with pleasure and excitement today. These are among the foundling texts of the radical tradition in America and Western Europe.

The Rights Of Man And Common Sense

Homer

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, the besieged city of Ilium, the feud between the gods, and the fate of mortals.

The Iliad

Marco Polo set off on his travels from Venice as a young man in 1271, and returned home in 1295 after spending 24 years away, 17 of them in China. He isone of the few early adventurers whose name nearly everyone knows. His book was one of the best-loved works of the Middle Ages, and has remained popular ever since. At a time when China is again assuming global importance, his account of China under the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan - the dazzlingly splendid capital in Beijing, the great southern metropolis of Hangzhou - is a classic reminder of the antiquity of Chinese power and civilization. 
Marco Polo also portrays countries and cities all along the trade route from the Mediterranean to Mongolia. He reminds us that Iraq's present suffering is not unique by relating the story of the attack on Baghdad by Mongol forces in 1258. He conveys the daunting prospect of the deserts of central Asia and the distant charms of Yunnan. And he reminds us of the huge merchant ships dominating China's trade with foreign countries, ships that far outstripped their European counterparts. He even writes about Japan, the first European to do so. 
His book was often thought of as a book of marvels, but one of its striking features to a contemporary reader is its clarity, realism and tolerance. As this new edition shows, he sometimes exaggerates, but his reputation for making things up is quite unfair, as Colin Thubron makes clear in his introduction. 
The original manuscript of Marco Polo's book is lost, and in the many later versions names and other details have become so garbled that it has been said that his itineraries are impossible to follow. This new Everyman edition shows this need not be so. It explains clearly all the references in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to south-east China. It also provides an up-to-date history of the book and the controversies surrounding it.

Marco Polo Travels

John Donne

Donne created new forms of lyric, satire, elegiac and religious verse, and his independence of view, compact manner of expression encompassing conflicting moods, impassioned paradox, outbreaks of cynicism and wry humour make his work particularly appealing to the twentieth-century mind. His poetry reflects every stage of his development from the piratical Jack Donne who sailed with Ralegh against the Spaniards and spent riotous nights in the London streets, to the penitent John Donne who became Dean of St Paul's and the most celebrated preacher of his age. C. A. Patrides' edition of Donne's English poems is undoubtedly the most complete and scholarly available.

The Complete English Poems

Alexander von Humboldt

Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing volcanoes in the Andes, swimming with crocodiles, racing through anthrax-infected Siberia, or publishing groundbreaking bestsellers. Ahead of his time, he recognized nature as an interdependent whole and he saw before anyone else that humankind was on a path to destroy it. He was one of the first European to study the Inca, Aztec and Mayan cultures and his epic five-year expedition to Latin America (1799–1804) prompted him to denounce slavery as 'the greatest evil ever to have afflicted humanity'. To Humboldt, the melody of his prose was as important as its content, and this selection from his most famous works - the Personal Narrative of his travels to Latin America, Cosmos, Views of Nature, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, The Geography of Plants and his anti-slavery essay in Political Essay of the Island of Cuba - allows us the pleasure of reading his own accounts of his daring explorations and new concept of nature. Humboldt’s writings profoundly influenced naturalists and poets including Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Whitman. The Selected Writings is not only a tribute to Humboldt’s important role in environmental history and science, but also to his ability to fashion powerfully poetic narratives out of scientific observations.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Brillat - Savarin's unique, exuberant collection of dishes, experiences, reflections, history and philosophy raised gastronomy to an art form. First published in France in 1825, this remarkable book reflected a new era in French cuisine: the advent of the restaurant, which gave the bourgeoisie the opportunity to select their dishes with precision and anticipation. Yet the author also gives his views on taste, diet and maintaining a healthy weight, on digestion, sleep, dreams and being a gourmand. Witty, shrewd and anecdotal, The Physiology of Taste not only contains some remarkable recipes, it an elegant argument for the pleasures of good food and a hearty appetite.

Physiology of Taste

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