Essays

The new bestseller from one of Britain's most pre-eminent philosophers and arguably the best known, A.C. GraylingEveryone wishes to live a life that is satisfying and fulfilling, in which there is achievement and pleasure, and which has the respect of...

Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', 'The Task of the Translator' and 'Theses on the Philosophy...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679783220Author Ralph Waldo EmersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 880Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 612gDimensions(mm)...

'Yes, what is Dionysian? - This book provides an answer - "a man who knows" speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his god.' The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a book about the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its...

Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions...

'What exactly is knowledge?' The Theaetetus is a seminal text in the philosophy of knowledge, and is acknowledged as one of Plato's finest works. Cast as a conversation between Socrates and a clever but modest student, Theaetetus, it explores one of...

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...

'A brilliant display of fireworks, attacking the widespread and banal notion that "in the beginning" sexual activity was guilt-free and delicious, being repressed and blighted only by the gloom of Victorianism' Spectator We talk about sex more and...

'His moral courage shines through from the start.' - Sunday Telegraph The definitive edition of the late Sir Roger Scruton's philosophical and political essays and reviews, now collected in one volume. The philosopher Roger Scruton was the leading...

A condensed guide to life, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Bed of Procrustes is an invaluable collection of aphorisms to help you navigate the modern world.Second edition, revised and expandedWhy are we so often unwilling to accept that life is...

The powerful, beautiful and chilling sequel to the bestselling Straw Dogs'By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright'Why do humans seek meaning...

'We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from our earliest youth ... Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater'This volume contains a selection of Nietzsche's brilliant and challenging aphorisms,...

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER'Honest, funny and dripping with witty aphorisms. Extremely entertaining and enlightening [...] all the way to journey's end' Herald One of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The...

Suicide is everywhere. It haunts history and current events. It haunts our own networks of friends and family. The spectre of suicide looms large, but the topic is taboo because any meaningful discussion must at the very least consider that the answer to...

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with...

Seize the day in the name of art. This creative call to arms from the mind of Neil Gaiman combines his extraordinary words with deft and striking illustrations by Chris Riddell. 'Like a bedtime story for the rest of your life, this is a book to live by...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAs Heard on NPR's This American Life'The delights he extols here (music, laughter, generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual cruelties . . . contagious in their joy' New York TimesThe winner of the NBCC...

'To create today means to create dangerously'This new collection contains some of Camus' most brilliant political writing as he reflects on moral responsibility and the role of the artist in the world. Letters to a German Friend, written and published...

'Perhaps the most entertaining work of philosophy ever written ... the first really systematic and serious attempt to say what love is' John Armstrong, GuardianIn the course of a lively drinking party, a group of Athenian intellectuals exchange views on...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Nobel Prize 1957.Book InformationISBN 9780525564454Author Albert CamusFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA Inc

A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine.In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be...

Selection includes The Portrait of Mr W.H., Wilde's defence of Dorian Gray, reviews, and the writings from 'Intentions' (1891): 'The Decay of Lying, 'Pen, Pencil, Poison', and 'The Critic as Artist'.Wilde is familiar to us as the ironic critic behind the...

Raymond Williams' seminal exploration of the history of meaning of some of the most important words in the English language. First published in 1976, and expanded in 1983, KEYWORDS reveals how the meanings of 131 words - including 'art',...

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of...

'No brief survey can do justice to the richness, complexity and detail of Foucault's discussion' New York Review of BooksThe second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in...

Raises one of the deepest and most puzzling questions we can put to ourselves ' What is Love?'Drawing on writers and thinkers as diverse as Plato, Tolstoy, Freud and Stendhal, John Armstrong explores how our perception of love is formed by culture and...

'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order'One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and...

'The most prescient of British public intellectuals' Pankaj Mishra, Financial TimesUpdated with a new foreword and two new chapters of John Gray's writing.Why is progress a pernicious myth? Why do beliefs that humanity can be improved end in farce or...

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical...

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he...

Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony...

One of the foundation-stones of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes' Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings is translated from the Latin with an introduction by Desmond M. Clarke in Penguin Classics.Descartes was prepared to go to any lengths in his...

One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of...

A creative call to arms from the mind of Neil Gaiman, combining his extraordinary words with deft and striking illustrations by Chris Riddell. Art Matters will inspire its readers to seize the day in the name of art. 'Like a bedtime story for the rest of...

A perceptive introduction to the mind of one of German's greatest writers, in a new translation for the first time in 150 years'The best German book there is' Nietzsche By the turn of the nineteenth century, the poet, novelist and thinker Johann...

Here's an accusation - Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything. When it comes to language, it all depends on what your definition of 'is' is. And one for the existentialists - you haven't lived until you think about death all the time. Daniel...

A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the...

A LANDMARK WORK OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. A GLOBAL BESTSELLER. STILL AS RELEVANT TODAY. With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 the threat of the Cold War which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century vanished. And with it the West looked to...

'The best book ever written' Nicholas Lezard, GuardianRobert Burton's labyrinthine, beguiling, playful masterpiece is his attempt to 'anatomize and cut up' every aspect of the condition of melancholy, from which he had suffered throughout his life...

In this frank and damning expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God...