Entertainment/Literature - Non-Fiction
Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History – David Aaronovitch
The Immigrant and the Community – Grace Abbott
The Meaning of Liff – humourous dictionary written by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. The book cover usually bears the tagline ‘This book will change your life!’
Study on Glaciers – Louis Agassiz. Written in 1840
On Painting – Leon Alberti
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 – Christopher Andrew
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – Karen Armstrong. Author of twelve books on comparative religion
A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete – Arthur Ashe
The Birds of America – John James Audubon
First plate in The Birds of America is a wild turkey. Printed in Double Elephant Folio
Of Truth – Francis Bacon. Written in 1601
Scouting for Boys – Robert Baden-Powell. Published in 1908
The English Constitution – Walter Bagehot
The Butterfly Isles – Patrick Barkham
On Crimes and Punishments – Cesare Beccaria (1764), condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology
Book of Household Management – Mrs (Isabella) Beeton
Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, The Second World War – Anthony Beevor
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture is a 1946 study of Japan by American anthropologist Ruth Benedict written at the invitation of the U.S. Office of War Information in order to understand and predict the behaviour of the Japanese
Ways of Seeing – John Berger
Matter and Memory – Henri Bergson
Shell Guides for motorists – John Betjeman
Ghastly Good Taste – John Betjeman’s first architectural work
History of British Birds –Thomas Bewick
The Devil’s Dictionary – Ambrose Bierce
The Cynic’s Word Book – Ambrose Bierce
Richard Milhous Nixon: The Invincible Quest – Conrad Black
Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea – first set of naval rules, produced by Admiral Robert Blake in 1652
Out of Africa – Karen Blixen, who was also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book by Harold Bloom on Western literature
Further Adventures in Search of Perfection – Heston Blumenthal
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge – Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein
Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies – James Bond
Reporting Royalty – Jennie Bond
The Cost of Discipleship – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson is a travel journal by James Boswell
The Consolations of Philosophy – Alain de Botton
The Architecture of Happiness – Alain de Botton
Religion for Atheists – Alain de Botton
A Street Cat Named Bob, Bob: No Ordinary Cat – James Bowen
The Skeptical Chemist – Robert Boyle
The Progressive Patriot – Billy Bragg
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown. A history of Native Americans in the American West in the late 19th century. The title is taken from the final phrase of a poem titled American Names by Stephen Vincent Benet
Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization – Gordon Brown
A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson, who walked the Appalachian Trail
Reflections on the Revolution in France – Edmund Burke, 1790
A Vindication of Natural Society – Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful – Edmund Burke
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy and The Feeling Good Handbook – David Burns
The Anatomy of Melancholy – Robert Burton (1621). Though presented as a medical text, the book uses melancholy as the lens through which all human emotion and thought may be scrutinized
The Storm: the World Economic Crisis and what it Means – Vince Cable
Winners And how They Succeed – Alistair Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell. Introduced the term monomyth, meaning ‘hero’s journey’
Ten Reasons – Edmund Campion, a Jesuit martyr executed in the reign of Elizabeth I
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote. Non-fiction novel inspired by an article in the New York Times in 1959. The story described the unexplained murder of the Clutter family in rural Holcomb, Kansas
The French Revolution: A History – Thomas Carlyle
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire – Sadi Carnot
The Game of Logic – Lewis Carroll
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson. Documents the detrimental effects on the environment – particularly on birds – of the indiscriminate use of pesticides
Black Diaries – Roger Casement
The Book of the Courtier – Baldassare Castiglione
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a work of speculative natural history and philosophy published anonymously in England in 1844. The 12th edition, published in 1884, revealed officially that the author was Robert Chambers
Papillon – Henri Charriere
Sakhalin Island – Anton Chekhov
The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast – Michel Chevreul
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy is a book by Noam Chomsky, first published in 2006, in which Chomsky argues that the United States is becoming a “failed state” and thus a danger to its own people and the world
Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance – Noam Chomsky
Syntactic Structures – Noam Chomsky
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, We Need to Talk About Kelvin – Marcus Chown
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – Amy Chua. Describes the strict parenting regimes of Chinese mothers
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples – Winston Churchill
It Takes the Village – Hillary Clinton
Rural Rides, Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine – William Cobbett
The End of The Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World And What We Eat – Charles Clover
Mister Briggs’ Hat – Kate Colquhoun. Account of the first railway murder, in 1864
Compete Hip and Thigh Diet – Rosemary Conley
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres – Copernicus. Published in1543
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989, is a business and self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey
Book of Common Prayer – Thomas Cranmer, 1549
Climate and Time – James Croll
The Book of the Law – sacred central text of Thelema. Written by Alexander Crowley
The Art of Happiness – Dalai Lama
The Last Mughal – William Dalrymple. Tells the story of Bahadur Shar Zafar in Delhi, in 1857
Return of a King – William Dalrymple. Story of first Afghan war of 1839–42
A New System of Chemical Philosophy – John Dalton
The Descent of Man, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals – Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin. Published in 1859. Full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms – last book published by Charles Darwin
The Origin of Society – Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather
Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794) is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin
The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins. In his choice of the title for this book, Dawkins refers to the watchmaker analogy made famous by William Paley in his book Natural Theology
Unweaving the Rainbow – Richard Dawkins
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution – Richard Dawkins
The Magic of Reality – Richard Dawkins
A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain – Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe was sent to prison in 1703 for writing political pamphlets
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea – Barbara Demick
Discource on the Method – Descartes. Includes “cogito ergo sum”. Published in 1637
Geometry – Descartes
Generation X – Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett
Slouching towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
The Vindication of the English Constitution – Benjamin Disraeli
Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics – William Donaldson
Literary Theory: An Introduction – Terry Eagleton
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God – Jonathan Edwards
The Population Bomb – Paul Ehrlich
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 – Friedrich Engels
The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children – (Desiderius) Erasmus
Le Guide Culinaire – Auguste Escoffier
The River Cottage Family Cookbook – Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr
The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson
Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculation) – Fibonacci (real name Leonardo of Pisa), 1202
The Complete Book of Running – Jim Fixx. Book that launched the jogging craze
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything – Joshua Foer. In 2006, Foer won the USA Memory Championship
The King's English is a book on English usage and grammar. It was written by the Fowler brothers, Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler. Published in 1906, and thus pre-dates Modern English Usage, which was written by Henry alone after Francis's death in 1918
Actes and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is a work of Protestant history and martyrology by John Foxe
Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl, 1946. Chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer
The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
The Sane Society – Erich Fromm
Cezanne. A Study of his Development – Roger Fry
The Ode Less Travelled – Stephen Fry. Title taken from lines by Robert Frost
The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth – Buckminster Fuller
Stasiland: Oh wasn’t it so Terrible – True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall – Anna Funder
The Great War and Modern Memory – Paul Fussell
The Green Book – Muammar Gaddafi
The Affluent Society – JK Galbraith
The Age of Uncertainty – JK Galbraith
The Economics of Innocent Fraud – JK Galbraith
The Starry Messenger – Galileo, 1610, was the first scientific treatise to be published based on observations made through a telescope. It reported his discoveries of the Galilean moons
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was a 1632 Italian language book by Galileo Galilei comparing the Copernican system with the traditional Ptolemaic system
Hereditary Genius – John Galton. First book about eugenics
Outlines of Geology – James Geikie
History of the Kings of Britain – Geoffrey of Monmouth, a 12th century Welsh monk
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon. Written in 1776
Malcolm Gladwell is a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist, based in New York City. He is best known for his books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009)
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants – Malcolm Gladwell
The Art of Cookery – Hannah Glasse. First published in 1747
Theory of Colours – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Published in 1810
Bad Science, Bad Pharma – Ben Goldacre
Claudius the God – Robert Graves
In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality – John Gribbin
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is the first non-fiction book written by John Grisham. The book details the story of former minor league baseball aspirant 'Ron' Williamson of Oklahoma, where he was raised in the strict Pentecostal household of his parents
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians – George Grove, who was the first director of Royal College of Music (1882)
A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection – J.B.S. Haldane
Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer
The White Spider – story of Heinrich Harrer’s ascent of the north face of the Eiger
All Hell Let Loose – Max Hastings. History of World War II
A Briefer History of Time – Stephen Hawking. Updated version of A Brief History of Time. ‘From the Big Bang to Black Holes’ – subtitle of A Brief History of Time
The Grand Design – Stephen Hawking
The Universe in a Nutshell – Stephen Hawking
Round Ireland with a Fridge, Playing the Moldovans at Tennis – Tony Hawks
The Road to Serfdom – Friedrich Hayek
Prices of Production, The Constitution of Liberty – Friedrich Hayek
Pneumatica, Automata, Mechanica, Metrica, Belopoeica, Catoptrica – Hero of Alexandria
Selenographia – Johannes Hevelius, 1645 moon atlas
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey – Rachel Hewitt
Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments – Gertrude Himmelfarb
God is not Great: The Case Against Religion – Christopher Hitchens
Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes (1651), from Book of Job
Hobbes described the natural state of mankind as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in Leviathan
Behemoth, also known as The Long Parliament, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes discussing the English Civil War
The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, The Age of Extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914–1991 – Eric Hobsbawm
The Uses of Literacy – Richart Hoggart
The Age of the Earth, Principles of Physical Geology – Arthur Holmes
Micrographia – Robert Hooke. Published in 1665
Garden Cities of To-morrow – Ebenezer Howard. Published in 1902
The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes
Kosmos – Alexander Van Humboldt. Attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge
Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language – John Humphrys
A Theory of the Earth – James Hutton. Published in 1795
Treatise on Light – Christiaan Huygens. 1678 wave theory of light
The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels – Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996) – David Irving
The Black Jacobins – C.L.R. James. History of the Haitian Revolution
Principles of Psychology – William James
The Primal Scream – Arthur Janov
Flowers of the Field – Rev. CA Johns
Darwin on Trial – Phillip Johnson. Proposes the theory of Intelligent Design
The Lives of the Poets – Samuel Johnson
A Dictionary of the English Language – Samuel Johnson, 1755
Who moved My Cheese? – Spencer Johnson
The Jewish War, The Antiquities of the Jews – Josephus. Written in 1st century AD
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393) – Julian of Norwich. This is believed to be the first book written in the English language by a woman
The World America Made, Of Paradise and Power, Dangerous Nation – Robert Kagan
Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future – Michio Kaku
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas a Kempis. A Christian devotional book
Profiles in Courage is a 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book attributed to John F. Kennedy, describing acts of bravery and integrity by eight United States Senators from throughout the Senate's history
Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery) – Johannes Kepler. His first major astronomical work, this was the first published defense of the Copernican system (1597)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – J.M. Keynes, laid the foundations for macroeconomics
The Economic Consequences of the Peace – J.M. Keynes. Written in 1919
The Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
No Logo – anti-globalisation polemic by Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) – Alfred Kinsey
On China – Henry Kissinger
The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women – John Knox. The book was written anonymously from Geneva against the female sovereigns of his day, particularly Mary of Guise
The Ghost in the Machine – Arthur Koestler. Koestler's materialistic account argues that the personal experience of duality arises from what Koestler calls a ‘holon’
Darwin’s Finches – David Lack
Mecanique Analytique – Joseph-Louis Lagrange's treatise on analytical mechanics, first published in 1788, offered the most comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics since Newton
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness – R.D. Laing
Elementary Treatise on Chemistry – Antoine Lavoisier
An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming – Nigel Lawson
All the Countries we’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To – Stuart Laycock. Claims that Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? – Leon Lederman
Codex Atlanticus – a twelve-volume, bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci, the largest such set
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a 2005 book by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner that has been described as melding pop culture with economics
SuperFreakonomics – Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Tristes Tropiques, Mythologiques – Claude Levi-Strauss
Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys – Michael Lewis
Snooker, Billiards and Pool – Horace Lindrum
Treatise on Tenures – Thomas de Littleton. First book on English law (1481)
King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression – Konrad Lorenz
Mars and its Canals – Percival Lowell. Explores the idea that the canals were created by Martians
The Accumulation of Capital – Rosa Luxemburg
Principles of Geology – Charles Lyell
The History of England from the Accession of James the Second is the full title of the volume of books more generally known as The History of England written by Lord Macaulay (Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay)
Discourses on Livy, The Art of War – Machiavelli
The Prince – Machiavelli. 1513 book dedicated to Medici family
History of Florence – Machiavelli
Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre
Pies and Prejudice – Stuart Maconie
Adventures on the High Teas – Stuart Maconie
The Armies of the Night – non-fiction novel written by Norman Mailer
My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall – John Major
Chequers: The Prime Minister's Country House and its History, Joan Sutherland: The Authorised Biography – Norma Major
An Essay on the Principle of Population – Thomas Malthus, 1798
Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, written in German. Published in 1848
The preamble to the main text of the Communist Manifesto states that the continent of Europe fears the "spectre of communism", and the powers of old Europe are uniting in "a holy alliance [intended to] exorcise this spectre"
Das Kapital – Karl Marx. Published in 1867
Human Sexual Response – William Masters and Virginia Johnson
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism – James Clerk Maxwell
Bang! The History of the Universe – Brian May, Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron – Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
I Can Make you Thin, I Can Make you Rich, I Can Make you Happy – Paul McKenna
Coming of Age in Samoa – Margaret Mead
Social Theory and Social Structure – Robert K. Merton
A System of Logic, The Principles of Political Economy – John Stuart Mill
The American Way of Death – Jessica Mitford
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871), Houses and House-lives of the American Aborigines (1881) – Lewis H Morgan
The Spirit of the Laws is a treatise on political theory first published anonymously by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu in 1748
A Guide to the Moon – Patrick Moore
The Culture of Cities – Lewis Mumford
Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements – Eadweard Muybridge
Unsafe at Any Speed – Ralph Nader. A 1965 study that revealed that many American automobiles were unsafe, especially the Chevrolet Corvair
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush – Eric Newby
Method of Fluxions, Opticks – Isaac Newton
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – Isaac Newton. Published in 1687
Notes on Nursing – Florence Nightingale, 1860
Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
Fundamentals of Ecology – Eugene Odum
Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra – Omar Khayyam
Fat is a Feminist Issue – Susie Orbach
On Divine Proportions – Luca Pacioli. Illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci
Common Sense, The Age of Reason, Rights of Man – Thomas Paine
I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) is an Italian treatise on architecture by Andrea Palladio
Description of Greece – Pausanius
Great Britain’s Great War – Jeremy Paxman
The Road Less Travelled – M. Scott Peck. First line – “life is difficult”
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe – Roger Penrose
The Emperor’s New Mind – Roger Penrose. Penrose argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness
Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty
How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate – Steven Pinker
Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth – John Playfair. Published in 1802
The Open Society and its Enemies – Karl Popper
The Fire and Sword Trilogy by John Prebble is about the fall of the clan system in Scotland. Culloden chronicles the defeat of the clans in one pivotal battle. The two other works are The Highland Clearances and Glencoe
The Cloudspotter’s Guide – Gavin Pretor-Pinney
The Wavewatcher’s Companion – Gavin Pretor-Pinney
English Journey – JB Priestley
Almagest – Ptolemy. Text book of mathematical astronomy
Geography – Ptolemy
Contrasts, The True Principles of Pointed Architecture, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England – Augustus Pugin
The History of the World, The Last Flight of the Revenge, The Discovery of Guiana – Walter Raleigh
Historia Plantarum – John Ray. Important work leading to modern taxonomy
The Stolen Generations – Peter Read. Refers to children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian and State government agencies and church missions
Ten Days that Shook the World is a book by American journalist and socialist John Reed about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 which Reed experienced firsthand
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero – David Remnick
David Ricardo introduced the theory of comparative advantage in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)
The Men Who Stare at Goats – Jon Ronson, is about the U.S. Army's exploration of New Age concepts and the potential military applications of the paranormal
Poverty, A Study of Town Life – Seebohm Rowntree. Details his investigation of poverty in York
A History of the Crusades – Steven Runciman . British historian known for his work on the Middle Ages
Modern Painters – John Ruskin
Unto This Last, The Stones of Venice – John Ruskin
A Bridge Too Far – Cornelius Ryan. Tells the story of Operation Market Garden
The Longest Day – Cornelius Ryan. The book, which tells the story of D-Day, takes its name from a quote by Erwin Rommel
The End of Poverty – Jeffrey Sachs
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. The title of the book comes from the case study of a man with visual agnosia. The book became the basis of an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman
Towton: The Battle of Palm Sunday Field – John Sadler
Lean In – Women, Work, and the Will to Lead – Sheryl Sandberg
The Rise of the Russian Empire – first book by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Economics: An Introductory Analysis – Paul Samuelson
Nuremberg Chronicle – Hartmann Schedel. Maps in the Chronicle were the first ever illustrations of many cities and countries.
Fast Food Nation – Eric Schlosser
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business – Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
What Is Life? – Erwin Schrodinger
Small is Beautiful – EF Schumacher
Young Stalin – Simon Sebag-Montefiore
Jerusalem: the Biography – Simon Sebag-Montefiore
The Bookseller of Kabul – Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad
1066 and all that – W Sellar and R Yeatman
Self-Sufficiency – John Seymour
South – Ernest Shackleton
A Mathematical Theory of Communication – Claude Shannon, 1948. First use of the word ‘bit’
The Philosophy of Money – Georg Simmel. Book on economic sociology
Fermat’s Last Theorem – Simon Singh
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith (1776)
Whither Socialism?, Making Globalization Work, The Three Trillion Dollar War, The Price of Inequality – Joseph Stiglitz
Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets – Dava Sobel
Principles of Biology – Herbert Spencer. Includes the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’
The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler
Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour, Matisse: The Life – Hilary Spurling
Married Love – Marie Stopes
Eminent Victorians – Lytton Strachey. Biographies of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon
Geographica – 17-volume work by Strabo, which presented a descriptive history of people and places from different regions of the world known to his era
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House – Kate Summerscale
The Ignoble Art – Edith Summerskill, MP who opposed boxing
The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowiecki
The Black Swan – Nassim Taleb. The Black Swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations
The Way of Perfection – St Teresa of Avila
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness – Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The book draws on research in psychology and behavioral economics to defend libertarian paternalism and active engineering of choice architecture
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World – Margaret Thatcher
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star – Paul Theroux
The Great Railway Bazaar – Paul Theroux
The Making of the English Working Class – E.P. Thompson
Penguins Stopped Play is a semi-autobiographical book by Harry Thompson that details his adventures with the Captain Scott XI amateur cricket side as they attempt to play cricket on every continent on the planet except Antarctica
Walden, first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods – Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
Robert John Thornton was an English physician and botanical writer, noted for A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus Von Linnaeus and The British Flora
Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian. His most famous works are Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on both the individual and the state in western societies
Future Shock, The Third Wave – Alvin Toffler
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is a self help book by Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
What Is Art? – Leo Tolstoy
The Last Days of Hitler – Hugh Trevor-Roper
In 1983, when he was a director of The Times, Hugh Trevor-Roper "authenticated" the so-called Hitler Diaries
On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem – Alan Turing, 1936
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, first published in 1899, is by the Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen
Immanuel Velikovsky is best known as the author of a number of controversial books on prehistory, in particular Worlds in Collision, published in 1950
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) – Vesalius (1543)
De architectura is a treatise of ten books on architecture written by the Roman architect Vitruvius and dedicated to his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus as a guide for building projects
Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays – Joel Waldfogel
Alfred Wainwright’s seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955 and 1966 has become the standard reference work to 214 of the fells of the English Lake District
Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, The Malay Archipelago, Darwinism – Alfred Russel Wallace
The Compleat Angler – Izaac Walton
When the Going Was Good – anthology of Evelyn Waugh travel books
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber
(Noah) Webster’s US Dictionary of English Language – 1928
Play In A Day guitar manual – Bert Weedon
Alison Weir is the highest-selling female historian in the United Kingdom. Many works on the Tudor period
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia – Rebecca West
Yo Blair – polemical 2006 book by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, attacking Tony Blair on various issues, particularly his relationship with George Bush
The Natural History of Selborne – Gilbert White
The Critic as Artist – Oscar Wilde
Culture and Society – Raymond Williams, 1958. How the notion of culture was developed in 18th, 19th and 20th century writing
Anatomy of the Brain – Thomas Willis, 1664. This work coined the term ‘neurology’
The Outsider – Colin Wilson
History of the American People – Woodrow Wilson
The Story of God – Robert Winston
Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power – Karl Wittfogel
Vagina: A New Biography – Naomi Wolf
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Men – Mary Wollstonecraft
In Search of England – Michael Wood
The Wrong Kind of Snow (the complete daily companion to the British weather) – Anthony Woodward and Rob Penn
Obama’s Wars – Bob Woodward
A Room of One's Own – extended essay by Virginia Woolf. Includes the famous dictum, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People – Toby Young. The tale of his failed five-year attempt to make it in the U.S. as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine
The Sublime Object of Ideology – Slavoj Zizek. Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic
