Christopher Harding teaches at the University of Edinburgh and frequently broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

This unprecedented book, by one of Britain's leading intellectual historians, describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of the past has had in the western world over the past 2500 years, treating the practise of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the cultural history of Europe and America. It magnificently brings to life the work of historians from the Greeks to the present, explaining their distinctive qualit...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution.

They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman - the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust survivor story'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New YorkerThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon ...

'This is a miracle of a book' George Lamming'Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an age' Owen Jones 'Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial'This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in the...