In Books that Changed the World Andrew Taylor sets himself the challenging task of choosing and profiling the 50 most important and influential books in the history of the world. He has selected books from every field of human creativity and intellectual endeavour - from poetry to politics, from fiction to philosophy, from theology to anthropology, and from economics to physics - to create a rounded and satisfying picture of how 50 towering achievements of the human intellect have built our societies, shaped our values, enhanced our understanding of the nature of the world, enabled technological advancements, and reflected our concerns and dilemmas, strengths and failings.

In a series of engaging and lively essays, Andrew Taylor sets each work and its author firmly in historical context, summarizes the content of the work in question, and explores its wider influence and legacy. A fascinating and richly informative read, and a clarion call to delve deeper into the library of great books, Books that Changed the World is a thought-provoking and stimulating read, and the likely cause of many an impassioned debate.

Titles include:

• The Iliad
• The Histories
• The Analects
• The Republic
• Holy Bible
• Odes of Horace
• Ptolemy’s Geographia
• The Kama Sutra
• Holy Koran
• Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Prince
• Mercator’s Atlas
• Don Quixote
• Shakespeare’s First Folio
• On the Circulation of the Blood
• Two Chief World Systems
• The Communist Manifesto
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Moby-Dick
• The Origin of Species
• On Liberty
• War and Peace
• Middlemarch
• First Telephone Directory
• 1001 Nights
• A Study in Scarlet
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• Collected Poems (Wilfred Owen)
• Relativity
• Ulysses
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• Keynes’ Theory of Employment
• Andrew Taylor
• Books That Changed the World
• Principia Mathematica
• Johnson’s Dictionary
• Sorrows of Young Werther
• The Wealth of Nations
• Common Sense
• Lyrical Ballads
• Pride and Prejudice
• A Christmas Carol
• If This is a Man
• 1984
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Second Sex
• Things Fall Apart
• Silent Spring
• Little Red Book
• Harry Potter (series)