Great Ideas

The Great Ideas Series began in 1995 and continued through to 2010, comprising five series of twenty books apiece. Each series is associated with a color: the first red, the second blue, the third green, the fourth purple, and finally the fifth with orange. Texts are provided with minimal introduction or annotation, and are distinctive because of their embossed, artistic front covers. The American series were heavily truncated and, unlike the original British, does not include a numbered checklist.

1	On the Shortness of Life	Seneca
2	Meditations	Marcus Aurelius
3	Confessions of a Sinner	Augustine
4	The Inner Life	Thomas à Kempis
5	The Prince	Niccolò Machiavelli
6	On Friendship	Michel de Montaigne
7	A Tale of a Tub	Jonathan Swift
8	The Social Contract	Jean-Jacques Rousseau
9	The Christians and the Fall of Rome	Edward Gibbon
10	Common Sense	Thomas Paine
11	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	Mary Wollstonecraft
12	On the Pleasure of Hating	William Hazlitt
13	The Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
14	On the Suffering of the World	Arthur Schopenhauer
15	On Art and Life	John Ruskin
16	On Natural Selection	Charles Darwin
17	Why I Am So Wise	Friedrich Nietzsche
18	A Room of One’s Own	Virginia Woolf
19	Civilization and Its Discontents	Sigmund Freud
20	Why I Write	George Orwell
21	The First Ten Books	Confucius
22	The Art of War	Sun Tzu
23	The Symposium	Plato
24	Sensation and Sex	Lucretius
25	An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom	Cicero
26	The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
27	Travels in the Land of Kubliai Khan	Marco Polo
28	The City of Ladies	Christine de Pizan
29	How to Achieve True Greatness	Baldesar Castiglione
30	Of Empire	Francis Bacon
31	Of Man	Thomas Hobbes
32	Urne-Burial	Sir Thomas Browne
33	Miracles and Idolatry	Voltaire
34	On Suicide	David Hume
35	On the Nature of War	Carl von Clausewitz
36	Fear and Trembling	Søren Kierkegaard
37	Where I Lived, and What I Lived For	Henry David Thoreau
38	Conspicuous Consumption	Thorstein Veblen
39	The Myth of Sisyphus	Albert Camus
40	Eichmann and the Holocaust	Hannah Arendt
41	In Consolation to his Wife	Plutarch
42	Some Anatomies of Melancholy	Robert Burton
43	Human Happiness	Blaise Pascal
44	The Invisible Hand	Adam Smith
45	The Evils of Revolution	Edmund Burke
46	Nature	Ralph Waldo Emerson
47	The Sickness Unto Death	Søren Kierkegaard
48	The Lamp of Memory	John Ruskin
49	Man Alone with Himself	Friedrich Nietzsche
50	A Confession	Leo Tolstoy
51	Useful Work versus Useless Toil	William Morris
52	The Significance of the Frontier in American History	Frederick Jackson Turner
53	Days of Reading	Marcel Proust
54	An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe	Leon Trotsky
55	The Future of an Illusion	Sigmund Freud
56	The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction	Walter Benjamin
57	Books v. Cigarettes	George Orwell
58	The Fastidious Assassins	Albert Camus
59	Concerning Violence	Frantz Fanon
60	The Spectacle of the Scaffold	Michel Foucault
61	Tao Te Ching	Lao-Tzu
62	Writings from the Zen Masters	Various
63	Utopia	Thomas More
64	On Solitude	Michel de Montaigne
65	On Power	William Shakespeare
66	Of the Abuse of Words	John Locke
67	Consolation in the Face of Death	Samuel Johnson
68	An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?	Immanuel Kant
69	The Executioner	Joseph de Maistre
70	Confessions of an English Opium-Eater	Thomas de Quincey
71	The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion	Arthur Schopenhauer
72	The Gettysburg Address	Abraham Lincoln
73	Revolution and War	Karl Marx
74	The Grand Inquisitor	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
75	On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings	William James
76	An Apology for Idlers	Robert Louis Stevenson
77	Of the Dawn of Freedom	W.E.B. Du Bois
78	Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid	Virginia Woolf
79	Decline of the English Murder	George Orwell
80	Why Look at Animals?	John Berger
81	The Tao of Nature	Chuang Tzu
82	Of Human Freedom	Epictetus
83	On Conspiracies	Niccolò Machiavelli
84	Meditations	René Descartes
85	Dialogue Between Fashion and Death	Giacomo Leopardi
86	On Liberty	John Stuart Mill
87	Hosts of Living Forms	Charles Darwin
88	Night Walks	Charles Dickens
89	Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions	Charles Mackay
90	The State as a Work of Art	Jacob Burckhardt
91	Silly Novels by Lady Novelists	George Eliot
92	The Painter of Modern Life	Charles Baudelaire
93	The ‘Wolfman’	Sigmund Freud
94	The Jewish State	Theodor Herzl
95	Nationalism	Rabindranath Tagore
96	Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism	Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
97	We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End	Winston Churchill
98	The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise	Jorge Luis Borges
99	Some Thoughts on the Common Toad	George Orwell
100	An Image of Africa	Chinua Achebe