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 known of a considerable body of Chinese works on the subject. It analyses the nature of war, and reveals how victory may be ensured.
The Book of Lord Shang is a political treatise for the instruction of rulers. These texts are anything but armchair strategy or ivory-tower speculation. They are serious, urgent and practical responses to the desperate situations in which they were written. They have been immensely influential both inside and outside China.

From Oscar Wilde's witty observation in Lady Windermere's Fan that 'I can resist everything except temptation', to Zsa Zsa Gabor's admission that 'I know nothing about sex, because I was always married', and by way of Woody Allen's numerous bon mots to the anonymous definition of psychiatry as being 'the care of the id by the odd', Connie Robertson has woven together a hilarious, stimulating and thought-provoking collection of the best humorous quotations which will provide the reader with much to ponder over long after the book has been put aside.

Few writers have had a more demonstrable impact on the development of the modern world than has Karl Marx (1818-1883). Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital.

Like much of Kafka's work, The Castle is enigmatic and polyvalent. Is itan allegory of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire as it disintegrates into modern nation states, or a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? Is it the search by a central European Jew for acceptance and integration into a dominant culture?

Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw capitalism is as correct now as when it was written, and some of his suggestions (progressive income tax, abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now accepted with little question.

Who was Nostradamus, and what faith should we place in his predictions? This book gives objective answers. It reveals that Michel de Nostredame,a 16th-century French doctor, was more Renaissance man than arcane magician - and that his prognostications can be compellingly astute.

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) began his celebrated diary on 1st January 1660 immediately prior to the Restoration of Charles II to the throne and the subsequent loosening of the rigid moral and social code enforced during the Puritan Commonwealth. As variously Clerk to the Council, a Member of Parliament, a prisoner in the Tower of London, twice Secretary to the Admiralty and President of the Royal Society, Pepys was in a unique position to observe and record in detail a fascinating ten-year period of English history which included not only the Restoration, but the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London the following year.

When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual development. Since then, it has had a more profound impact on European thought. Rousseau left posterity a model of the reflective life - the solitary, uncompromising individual, the enemy of servitude and habit and the selfish egoist who dedicates his life to a particular ideal.

The Wordsworth Crossword Companion incorporates many special features: Clear guidance on how to recognize and work out anagrams and how to decipher cryptic clues. Thousands of synonym entries arranged in order of the number of letters in every word, e.g. fault n (3) bug; (4) flaw, lack, spot; (5) blame, error, taint, (6) defect; (7) absence, blemish, failing, frailty, mistake; (8) weakness; (10) deficiency, inadequacy; (11) shortcoming; (14) responsibility; over 30,000 synonyms. A helpful introduction on the art of solving crosswords.

1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce.

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 appear in full in this edition.

De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures. His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the 'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.

In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the mental abilities of humans, of language, of our social structures and our moral capacities, he attempts to show that there is no clear dividing line between animals and humans.

Dreams have variously inspired and haunted kings, poets, inventors, artists, musicians, statesmen and others since the dawn of recorded experience. Gustavus Hindman Miller's Dictionary of Dreams first appeared in 1909, ten years after Sigmund Freud's pioneering work The Interpretation of Dreams, and is therefore an historical work on dream analysis first published at the time of a quantum leap in human consciousness.10,000 entries cover Bananas to Cauliflowers, Measles to Mustard and Virgins to Zebras.

The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase & Fable explains the origins of the familiar and the unfamiliar in everyday speech and literature, including the colloquial and the proverbial, and embracing archaeology, history, religion, the arts, science, mythology, and characters from fiction. This invaluable dictionary, which revises and updates the original work of Dr Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, encompasses material from all over the English speaking world and cites many equivalents from other European countries.

The Wordsworth Dictionary of Synonyms & Antonyms will enable readers to find the most appropriate word to use on a wide range of occasions. It is designed in particular for students, those writing reports, letters and speeches, and crossword solvers, but everyone who enjoys the richness and diversity of the English language will find a great deal to reward them within its covers.

The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about', said Oscar Wilde more than a hundred years ago. But this remark seems perhaps even more relevant to our present world where so many seek publicity at any cost. Wilde's well-turned phrases and spontaneous insults still cause much amusement and admiration. Most of us miss the opportunities for bon mots, finding them long after the moments have passed, but Wilde seems never to have been short of suitable words - flattering, witty and on occasions savagely cruel.

Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by far the more influential of the Two Treatises) were widely read by Locke's contemporaries and near contemporaries. His eighteenth-century readers included philosophers, historians and political theorists, but also community and political leaders, engaged laypersons, and others eager to participate in the expanding print culture of the era.

Hume's works, controversial in his day, remain deeply and widely influential in ours, especially for his contributions to our understanding of the nature of morality, political and economic theory, philosophy of religion, and philosophical naturalism.
This volume also includes Hume's anonymous Abstract of Books I and II of the Treatise, and the short autobiographical essay, `My Own Life', which he wrote just before his death.

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 as atheistic, then hailed by humanists as the gospel of Pantheism.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is, for Russians, their greatest writer; Eugene Onegin is his greatest work. Yet it remains little known outside Russia. Attempts to render Pushkin's Russian stanzas into verse have tried in vain to imitate the most inimitable features of the original, while masking many of its other glories.

Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life's work of Germany's greatest poet. Beginning with an intriguing wager between God and Satan, it charts the life of a deeply flawed individual and his struggle against the nihilism of his diabolical companion Mephistopheles.

This collection of four plays contains, A Doll's House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), Henrik Ibsen's most striking depictions of the struggle by individuals â especially women â to realize their full potential; it also presents Peer Gynt (1867), an early verse tour-de-force, not originally intended for the stage, on the nature of the self, and The Master Builder (1892), a play that explores the clash between the old and the new in richly metaphorical language.

Germinal (1885) is the thirteenth in Emile Zola's cycle of twenty novels about the Rougon-Macquart dynasty. It tells the story of Etienne Lantier, from the illegitimate Macquart branch of the family, who arrives in the mining settlement of Montsou, and witnesses at first hand the appalling conditions in which miners live and work.

These Comedies are among the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. In each a problem emerges, is then intensified to a point of maximum confusion and potential upset, before the chaos is resolved, however improbably, into general goodwill and a spate of marriages
Romeo and Juliet shows us the archetypal story of fated young love; Hamlet, the tortured psyche of the young prince of Denmark; Othello, a strikingly modern representation of racial difference; King Lear, a man stripped of all material and psychological comforts; and Macbeth, a dark investigation of the origins and effects of, evil.

Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the Battle of Salamis fought between sausage-sellers? Which is the oldest language in the world? Why did Leonidas and his 300 Spartans spend the morning before the battle of Thermopylae combing their hair? Why did every Babylonian woman have to sit in the Temple of Aphrodite until a man threw a coin into her lap, and how long was she likely to sit there? And what is the best way to kill a crocodile?

Translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur'an (also known as The Koran) is the sacred book of Islam. It is the word of God whose truth was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over a period of 23 years. As it was revealed, so it was committed to memory by his companions, though written copies were also made by literate believers during the lifetime of the Prophet.

Henry Morton Stanley's greeting to the Scottish medical missionary David Livingstone 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' is to exploration what Holmes's 'Elementary, my dear Watson' is to detective fiction. It took place in a remote African settlement when a travelling correspondent for the New York Herald successfully concluded an assignment to find the renowned explorer. But the meeting, and the events surrounding it, proved to be more than just a simple news story.

The Comedy tells the story of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman. In the Inferno, Dante's protagonist - and his reader - is presented with a graphic vision of the dreadful consequences of sin, and encounters an all-too-human array of noble, grotesque, beguiling, ridiculous and horrific characters.

Freud is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis, the key to unlocking the human mind, a task which has become essential to man's survival in the twentieth century, as science and technology have rushed ahead of our ability to cope with their consequences.
Freud saw that man is at war with himself and often unable to tolerate too much reality.

Sigmund Freud's controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. The `Freudian slip', the `Oedipus complex', `childhood sexuality', `libido', `narcissism' `penis envy', the `castration complex', the `id', the `ego' and the `superego',`denial', `repression', `identification', `projection', `acting out', the `pleasure principle', the `reality principle', `defence-mechanism' -are all taken for granted in our everyday vocabulary.

The works of the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus represent one of the most important records of Judaism and the Jews that survive from the ancient world. The Jewish Antiquities, his largest historical enterprise, is an account in twenty books of Jewish history from the creation to the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66.

Rene Descartes (1569-1650), the `father' of modern philosophy, is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history: his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity. Breaking with the conventions of his own time and suffering persecution by the Church as a consequence, Descartes in his writings - most of which are philosophical classics - attempted to answer the central questions surrounding the self, God, free-will and knowledge, using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith.

Malory's Le Morte Darthur is a story of noble knights, colourful tournaments and fateful love, set in a courtly society which is outwardly secure and successful, but in reality torn by dissent and, ultimately, treachery. Originally published in 1485, Malory's Le Morte Darthur is here presented in modern spelling and is accompanied by an Introduction and helpful Glossary.

With an Introduction by Dr Richard Serjeantson, Trinity College, Cambridge Since its first publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has been recognised as one of the most compelling, and most controversial, works of political philosophy written in English. Forged in the crucible of the civil and religious warfare of the mid-seventeenth century, it proposes a political theory that combines an unequivocal commitment to natural human liberty with the conviction that the sovereign power of government must be exercised absolutely.

The 22-year old James Boswell first met Johnson, who was then aged 54, in 1763. Nine years later he wrote in his journal of his `constant plan to write the life of Mr Johnson'. Boswell was tireless in his search for authenticated proof, and his training as a lawyer helped him sift the evidence of friends and to operate forensically on Johnson himself. Boswell drew him out as no one else could, and although three-quarters of the book concerns the last twenty years of Johnson's life, his skill in constructing the early years is remarkable.

Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus,the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to bedchamber - their intrigues, their loves and their deaths.

London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition.

This selection of Kafka's shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa's overnight transformation into a verminous insect, his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself and the reaction of his family. It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement and objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt, affection, responsibility and self-doubt that characterise Kafka's perception of intimate emotional relationships - themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story

According to Mohammed, the one true religion was revealed to five great prophets before him - Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. But each time their message was ignored and people chose to worship false gods instead. As the last and greatest prophet of the one and only God, it was his task to abolish all idolatry.

The Ethics contains his views on what makes a good human life. While the work continues to stimulate and challenge modern philosophers, the general course of the argument is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Both as a key influence in the history of ideas and as a work containing unique insights into the human condition, this is a book that simply demands to be read.

Translated by Lee M. Hollander, with an Introduction by Thorsteinn Gylfason.Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first recounts the touching friendship between noble Gunnar and the statesman Njal, together with the fatal enmity between their wives. The second part works out the central tragedy of the saga, while the third describes the retribution wrought by Flosi and Kari.

John Stuart Mill (1806 1873) is the most important of Britain's nineteenth-century philosophers. His writings and activities were many and varied. The works reprinted in this volume were first published during a particularly prolific ten-year span, from 1859 to 1869. This essay remains a major influence upon liberal political thought today. In this work, Mill defines liberty as an absolute individual right, and defends freedom of speech as a necessary condition of social and intellectual progress.

Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task.

John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narrative genius which reached its apotheosis in this, his greatest work. It is an allegory of the Christian life of true brilliance and is presented as a dream which describes the pilgrimage of the hero - Christian - from the City of Destruction via the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair over the River of the Water of Life and into the Celestial City.

Anton Chekhov's popularity in the west is without parallel for a foreign writer. He has been absorbed into our culture, and accepted as one of our own. His plays lend themselves easily to the stage, calling for actors with intelligence and common sense rather than a dramatic voice or histrionic skills. He takes from everyday life themes of frustration which apply to us all - the difficulty of carving out a happy existence,the problems of love, the fading of hope, the universal feeling that time passes and we never quite get things right.

If Shakespeare had died at the age Marlowe died, there would have been no question that Marlowe was the leading figure in English Renaissance drama. This edition of all his plays shows why. The plays give us a clear picture of Marlowe as a radical theatrical poet of great linguistic and dramatic daring, whose characters constantly strive to break out of the social, religious and rhetorical bonds within which they are confined.

Written in 1513 for the Medici, following their return to power in Florence, The Prince is a handbook on ruling and the exercise of power. It remains as relevant today as it was in the sixteenth century. Widely quoted in the Press and in academic publications, The Prince has direct relevance to the issues of business and corporate governance confronting global corporations as they enter a new millennium.

Before returning to his birthplace, Almustafa, the 'prophet', is asked for guidance by the people of Orphalese. His words, redolent with love and understanding, call for universal unity, and affirm Gibran's certainty of the correlated nature of all existence, and of reincarnation. The Prophet has never lost its immediate appeal and has become a ubiquitous touchstone of spiritual literature.