Penguin Books Ltd: 3539 books

A sparkling new translation of the classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one...

As Marco Polo (1254-1324) returned home across the Indian Ocean, after years in the service of Genghis Khan, he picked up a fabulous array of stories from sailors and merchants, about the peoples of the region, some reliable, some wholly implausible, but all fascinating. Great Journeys allows...

The Poetry of Sex - a raucous, highly enjoyable anthology by acclaimed poet Sophie Hannah 'We've been at it all summer, from the Canadian border to the edge of Mexico . . .' It's hard to imagine a more fruitful subject for poets than sex, in all its glorious manifestations: from desire...

Allen’s Dictionary of English Phrases is the most comprehensive survey of this area of the English language ever undertaken. Taking over 6000 phrases, it explains their meaning, explores their development and gives citations that range from the Venerable Bede to Will Self. Crisply and wittily written,...

Set alongside The Analects and Mencius, these two texts make up the 'Four Books' of Chinese Confucian tradition. Their depiction of the 'Way of Great Learning' focuses on the moral tenets of Confucian thinking, establishing a universal framework that links individuals with the cosmos. By drawing together...

The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, is one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration the authors produced this incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage...

One of Freud's central achievements was to demonstrate how unacceptable thoughts and feelings are repressed into the unconscious, from where they continue to exert a decisive influence over our lives. This volume contains a key statement about evidence for the unconscious, and how it works,...

How far would you go to be the perfect mother? The hilarious Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly*,* based on her enormously popular blog, recounts one woman's attempt to move her family and her life from cosmopolitan London to rural Northumberland. Maybe hormones ate her brain. How else did...

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Elif Shafak's examination of national identity. "You know, I never understand. How come their children are so quiet and well disciplined?" "Yeah,"...

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother'...

'"One more step, Mr Hands," said I, "and I'll blow your brains out"' In Treasure Island, a weathered old sailor known as Billy Bones arrives at the inn of young Jim Hawkins's parents - and it is the start of an adventure beyond anything he could have imagined. For when Bones...

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity,...

'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' To this 'one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's essay On Liberty is dedicated. While many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who...

Contemptuous of Europe's 'civilising mission' in Africa, Mary Kingsley's (1862-1900) extraordinary journeys through tropical west Africa are a remarkable record, both of a world which has vanished and of a writer and explorer of immense bravery, wit and humanity. Paddling through mangrove swamps,...