Life is more unpredictable than we are prepared to accept. In this brilliant book Nassim Nicholas Taleb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_taleb and http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/) distils his idiosyncratic wisdom to demolish our illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness. Only by accepting what we don’t know, he shows, can we really see the world as […]

In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion) looks at the American political process and at ‘that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life’. Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals

John Berger’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger) Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. It was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: ‘This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . .

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn) reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state, that ruled the lives of millions. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims, men, women, and children, we encounter

The famous child psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim), explains how fairy tales educate, support, and liberate the emotions of children. Wicked stepmothers and beautiful princesses … magic forests and enchanted towers … little pigs and big bad wolves … Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for hundreds of years. It’s in this book