The Greatest Nonfiction Books Since 1900 Written by British Authors
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1 . A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by . First published during 24 October 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges ...
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2 . Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War, written in the first person.
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3 . The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...
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4 . The Second World War by Winston Churchill
The Second World War is a six-volume history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Sir Winston Churchill. It was largely responsible for him winning (in 1953) t...
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5 . Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an 1,181-page travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941. The book gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazi...
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6 . Collected Essays of George Orwell by George Orwell
In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the...
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7 . Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity is a theological book by C. S. Lewis, adapted from a series of BBC radio talks made between 1941 and 1944, while Lewis was at Oxford during World War II. Considered a classic of C...
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8 . Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetics. Chesterton considered this book a companion to his other work, Heretics. In the book's preface Chesterton...
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9 . Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations is, along with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the two most influential works by the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In it, Wittgenstein discus...
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10 . The Open Society by Karl Popper
The Open Society and Its Enemies is an influential two-volume work by Karl Popper written during World War II. Failing to find a publisher in the United States, it was first printed in London by Ro...
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11 . A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee
A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In this immensely detailed and complex work, Toynbee traces the birth, growth and decay of ...
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12 . Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than t...
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13 . The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence CB, DSO (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935), known professionally as T. E. Lawrence, was a British military officer renowned especially for his liaison role dur...
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14 . The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a st...
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15 . Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain
Testament of Youth is the first instalment, covering 1900–1925, in the memoir of Vera Brittain (1893–1970). It was published in 1933. Brittain's memoir continues with Testament of Experience, publi...
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16 . Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
Good-bye to All That is the autobiography of Robert Graves. First published in 1929, the work is a landmark anti-war memoir of life in the trenches during World War I. The title expresses Graves' d...
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17 . Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (the oldest member of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. It...
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18 . Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
The wit and lively, informed originality Forster employs in his study of the novel has made this book a classic. Deliberately avoiding the chronological development approach of what he classifies '...
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19 . A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy
A 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.
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20 . The Worst Journey in the World by Robert Falcon Scott
The Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. It was written and published in 1922 by a survivor of the expedition, Apsley Che...
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21 . The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson
The Making of the English Working Class is an influential and pivotal work of English social history.
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22 . The Face of Battle by John Keegan
The Face of Battle, is a 1976 non-fiction book on military history by the English military historian John Keegan. It deals with the structure of warfare in three time periods—medieval Europe, th...
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23 . Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Birthday Letters, published in 1998 (ISBN 0-374-52581-1), is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won ...
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24 . The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin
Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, ...
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25 . Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of the BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctua...
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26 . Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott
Rationalism in Politics established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of...
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27 . The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, revised and expanded in 1970), is Norman Cohn's study of millenarian cult movements. Cov...
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28 . The Great Terror by Robert Conquest
The Great Terror is a book by British writer Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of t...
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30 . The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
The Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece...
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31 . The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost...
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32 . The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man is a two-part history of mankind, Christ, and Christianity, by G. K. Chesterton. Published in 1925, it is to some extent a conscious rebuttal of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History,...
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35 . Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
"Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it." After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson-bestsellingauthor of ...
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36 . Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
Hideous Kinky is an autobiographical novel by Esther Freud, daughter of British painter Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. It depicts the author's unconv...
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37 . Love's Work by Gillian Rose
Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and endurance of love, ...
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38 . Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. It is an ambitious project to identify the r...
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39 . Second World War by John Keegan
Praised as "the best military historian of our generation" by Tom Clancy, John Keegan here reconsiders his masterful study of World War II, The Second World War, with a new foreword. Keegan examine...
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40 . Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness by Thomas More
This New York Times bestseller (more than 200,000 hardcover copies sold) provides a path-breaking lifestyle handbook that shows how to add spirituality, depth, and meaning to modern-day life by nur...
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41 . The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling by Angus Wilson
A critical biography of Kipling focuses on the writer's literary and peripatetic searches for a refuge to replace the lost Indian Eden of his childhood
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42 . Scrutiny by F. R. Leavis
Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is.
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43 . Looking Back by Norman Douglas
Looking Back is an autobiography written by the American author Lois Lowry, in which she uses photographs and accompanying text to construct a picture of her life.
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44 . How to Cook by Delia Smith
Delia's How to Cook is a simple-to-follow cooking course for people of all ages and abilities. In this comprehensive two-part book series, Delia returns to the very roots of cooking to look at the ...
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45 . Citizens by Simon Schama
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is a book by the historian Simon Schama. It was published in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and like many other works in that year, w...
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47 . The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood
The Idea of History is the best-known work of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R.G. Collingwood. It was originally published posthumously in 1946, having been mainly recon...
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50 . The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy (1912) is one of Bertrand Russell's attempts to create a brief and accessible guide to the problems of philosophy. Focusing on problems he believes will provoke positive ...
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51 . Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis
Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2 is a book published in 1900 written by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), an English physician, writer and social reformer. The book deals with the phenomenon of se...
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52 . An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 – December 30, 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of scien...
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53 . The Expanding Universe by Arthur Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars...
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54 . Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian is an essay by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Originally a talk given 6 March 1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the N...
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55 . Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation by Arnold Toynbee
There is nothing in the precepts of Islam which justifies the slaughter which has been perpetrated. I am told on good authority that high Moslem religious authorities condemned the massacres ordere...
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56 . Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 – December 30, 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of scien...
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57 . West With the Night by Beryl Markham
West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It ...
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58 . Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
This classic study of European history begins in 500 A.D. with the aftermath of the fall of Rome and ends with the close of the 13th century. Dawson shows how,apidly throughout Europe and changed t...
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59 . Napoleon by Vincent Cronin
"Vincent Cronin superbly realises his objective in this, probably the finest of all modern biographies of Napoleon. It is generally regarded as this author's masterpiece"--Back cover.
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60 . The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Examines a part of the action of the Battle of Balaclava, one of the earlier and most important battles of the Crimean War.
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61 . The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find Berlin's ...
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63 . The Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell
The Principia Mathematica is a 3-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. PM, as it is often abbreviated (not to be confused with Ru...
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65 . Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer
Staying Power is recognised as the definitive history of black people in Britain, an epic story that begins with the Roman conquest and continues to this day. In a comprehensive account, Peter Frye...
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66 . The Death of Woman Wang MMP by Jonathan Spence
In The Death of Woman Wang the award-winning historian Jonathan Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure time and place: provincial China in the late 17th century. Drawing on a range of sources,...
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67 . Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham
Science and Civilisation in China is a series of books initiated and edited by British biochemist and China scholar Joseph Needham (1900-1995). They deal with the history of science and technology ...
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68 . The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the P...
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69 . Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
Schott's Miscellanies are a trio of best-selling books by Ben Schott. They consist of a collection of trivia generally centred on the culture of the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent the rest ...
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70 . A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
A Year in Provence is autobiographical novel by Peter Mayle about his first year in Provence, and the local events and customs. It was adapted into a television miniseries starring John Thaw and Li...
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71 . A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes
This multi-award book is history on an epic yet human scale. Vast in scope, exhaustive in original research, written with passion, narrative skill, and human sympathy, "A People's Tragedy" offers a...
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72 . Diaries by Alan Clark
Alan Clark started keeping a regular diary in 1955 which lasted until August 1999, during his second spell as a Member of Parliament, when he was incapacitated due to the onset of the brain tumour ...
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73 . A History of the Crusades by Stephen Runciman
A History of the Crusades is the work that historian Stephen Runciman is arguably most noted for. A cursory glance at the body of Runciman’s work would lead many to believe that his passion for hi...
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74 . The Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P. Taylor
Was Hitler all that bad? Wasn't he just an opportunist who took advantage of Anglo-French dithering and appeasement? The label 'iconoclastic' applies to few historians so well as it does to Taylor.
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75 . A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples is a four-volume history of Britain and her former colonies and possessions throughout the world, written by Winston Churchill, covering the period from Ca...
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76 . Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1928. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognised as a c...
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78 . The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan Spence
Chronicles the history of the Chinese Revolution, focusing on the people and events of modern Chinese history, the writings of modern Chinese authors, the issues facing the People's Republic, and m...
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79 . Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Draws on research by army historians to describe the cover-up of disastrous events in the Crimea, and to seperate Nightingale's real achievments from her mythical ones.
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80 . The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield
The Strange Death of Liberal England is a book written by George Dangerfield, first published in 1935, attempting to explain the decline of the British Liberal Party in the years 1910 to 1914.
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81 . Vermeer by Lawrence Gowing
Lawrence Gowing's classic study has long been treasured for the painterly sensibilities he brought to this greatly loved body of work.
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82 . Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackout...
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87 . Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban
Raban (Old Glory), an Englishman now settled in Seattle, has written a vivid and utterly idiosyncratic social history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana that went boom and bust during ...
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88 . The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Reformation: A History (2003) is a history book by English historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. It is a survey of the European Reformation between 1490 and 1700. It won the 2004 National Book Critics...
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89 . Rough Crossings by Simon Schama
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution is a history book and television series by Simon Schama. This gives an account of the history of thousands of enslaved African Amer...
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91 . Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Bad Blood is a 2000 work blending collective biography and memoir by the Welsh literary critic and novelist Lorna Sage.
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92 . Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). Jeanette Winterson’s bold and rev...
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93 . The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich
An illustrated introduction to art appreciation with a survey of the major art periods and styles and descriptions of the work and world of the masters
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94 . The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, ancient tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines Aboriginals passed the songs which rev...
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95 . A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything (ISBN 0-7679-0817-1) is a general science book by Bill Bryson, which explains some areas of science, using a style of language more accessible to the general pu...
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97 . Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir[3] in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The ...
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99 . The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
The American Way of Death was an exposé of abuses in the funeral home industry in the United States, written by Jessica Mitford and published in 1963. Feeling that death had become much too sentime...
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100 . Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
The southern Arabian desert, a quarter million square miles of sand (650,000 square kilometers), is now a place of oil wells and Land Rovers, but before the 1950s it was still known as the Empty Qu...
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104 . Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene
Journey Without Maps (1936) is a travel account by Graham Greene, about a 350-mile, 4-week walk through the interior of Liberia in 1935. It was Greene's first trip outside of Europe. He hoped to le...
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108 . Alive by Piers Paul Read
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors is a 1974 book by the British writer Piers Paul Read documenting the events of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.
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109 . Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith is the author of Moondust : In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. HarperCollins. 2005. ISBN 0-00-715541-7. , which tells the story of the twelve U.S. astronauts who journeyed to the ...
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115 . An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beir...
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116 . The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World is Harvard professor Niall Ferguson's tenth book, published in 2008, and an adapted television documentary for Channel 4 (UK) and PBS (US). I...
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118 . My Early Life by Winston Churchill
This memoir was first published in 1930 and describes the author's school days, his time in the Army, his experiences as a war correspondent and his first years as a member of Parliament.
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121 . The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis
'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.' So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemic...
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123 . Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes
Tales from Ovid is a poetical work written by the English poet Ted Hughes. Published in 1997 by Faber and Faber, it is a retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It won the Whitbre...
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125 . The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
The Joy of Sex is an illustrated sex manual by Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D., first published in 1972. An updated edition was released in September, 2008.
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127 . The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies bas...
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128 . The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Late in 1945, Trevor-Roper was appointed by British Intelligence in Germany to investigate conflicting evidence surrounding Hitler's final days and to produce a definitive report on his death. The ...
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129 . The Paris Review Interviews by Paris Review
The Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine based in New York City. As its name suggests it was founded in Paris in 1953, for "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and...
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130 . Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
Written in 1968 and revised in 1972, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom was the first book to celebrate the language and the primal essence of rock 'n' roll. But it was much more than that. It was a cogent...
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132 . The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell
The Blair Years is a book by Alastair Campbell, featuring extracts from his diaries detailing the period during which he worked for Tony Blair. Published by Random House, the book was released on 9...
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133 . Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly
“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” writes Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.” First published in 1938 and long out of print, Enemies of Promise, an “inquiry into the problem of how to write ...
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134 . The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book written and published by the British economist John Maynard Keynes.[1] After the First World War, Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference ...
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135 . The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the British writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions a...
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136 . A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David
A Book of Mediterranean Food - published in 1950 - was Elizabeth David's first book and it is based on a collection of recipes she made while living in France, Italy, the Greek islands and Egypt. '...
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137 . Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moment," A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the ...
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138 . The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark
From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.
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139 . Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." -Los Angeles Times Spl...
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140 . The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
Logik der Forschung is a 1934 book by Karl Popper. It was originally written in German, but reformulated in English by Popper himself some years later, to be published as The Logic of Scientific Di...
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141 . Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
Awakenings--which inspired the major motion picture--is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for dec...
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142 . Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess
These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco...
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143 . Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
"I don’t believe in God, but I miss him." So begins Julian Barnes’s brilliant new book that is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mor...
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