Looking for adventure and a new life, Ishmael, the story's narrator, decides to find work on a whaling boat. On arriving at the Massachusetts harbour to begin his search, the only bed available is already half occupied by a "cannibal" named Queequeg. Although Queequeg has limited English, a friendship forms and the two men sign up for work together aboard the Pequod under the infamous Captain Ahab. Consumed by an insane rage, Captain Ahab has but...

The first volume of Decline and Fall was published in 1776, and by the time the final volume appeared in 1787, Gibbon had produced an exhaustive, million-and-a-half-word account of a 'revolution, which shall ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth'. This panoramic work, covering 13 centuries from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, has been described as 'a bridge that carries one from the ancient world to the...

The Dialogues of Plato, written between 427 and 347 b.c., rank among the most important and influential works in Western thought. Most famous are the first four, in which Plato casts his teacher Socrates as the central disputant in colloquies that brilliantly probe a vast spectrum of philosophical ideas and issues. Socrates' ancient words are still true, and the ideas found in Plato's Dialogues still form the foundation of a thinking person's education....

The most famous book on politics ever written, The Prince remains as lively and shocking today as when it was written almost five hundred years ago. Initially denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and a recommendation of tyranny, it has more recently been defended as the first scientific treatment of politics as it is practiced rather than as it ought to be practiced. Harvey C. Mansfield's brilliant translation of this classic work, along with...

"This convenient single-volume edition contains all three parts of Dante's 14th-century poem; Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso; in an acclaimed translation by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Combining classical and Christian history as well as medieval politics and religion, this trilogy of sublime verse is among Western civilization's most important artistic works and essential reading for students of literature and history. Dante's allegory...

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...