Translated by C.E.Detmold. With an Introduction by Lucille Margaret Kekewich.Written in 1513 for the Medici, following their return to power in Florence, The Prince is a handbook on ruling and the exercise of power. It remains as relevant today as it was in the sixteenth century. Widely quoted in the Press and in academic publications, The Prince has direct relevance to the issues of business and corporate governance confronting global corporations as they...

No matter how practised we are at history, it always humbles us. No matter how often we visit the past, it always surprises us.Winner of the Ernest Scott Prize and Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-fiction'A rare feat of imagination and generosity' —Mark McKennaWith every sentence they write, historians must walk the tightrope between discipline and imagination, empathy and evidence. In this landmar...

'An unforgettable, multi-layered history, Alice's dreaming is at once biography, literary thriller and stunning evocation of Country and place.' —Mark McKennaEarly last century, Alice Duncan-Kemp grew up on a remote Queensland cattle station. Later she would write down her childhood memories of learning from Aboriginal women and men at home on their own Country. In her books, she evoked a rich parallel universe of storytelling and lore, which she felt privileged to witne...

Translated by J.J. Graham, revised by F.N. Maude Abridged and with an Introduction by Louise Willmot.On War is perhaps the greatest book ever written about war. Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian soldier, had witnessed at first hand the immense destructive power of the French Revolutionary armies which swept across Europe between 1792 and 1815. His response was to write a comprehensive text covering every aspect of warfare.On War is both a ph...

‘I was sitting upon a low bench, made of rough boards, and without coat or hat. I was handcuffed. Around my ankles also were a pair of heavy fetters. One end of a chain was fastened to a large ring in the floor, the other to fetters on my ankles . . . Then did the idea begin to break upon my mind, at first dim and confused, that I had been kidnapped.’Solomon Northup’s kidnap in 1841 tore him away from a life of relative comfort as a free-born African-American farmer and violinist i...

With an Introduction and Notes by Bernard Waites, The Open UniversityIn 1795 Mungo Park, a twenty-four year old Scottish surgeon, set out from the Gambia to trace the course of the Niger, a river of which Europeans had no first-hand knowledge. Travels in the interior districts of Africa… is his Journal of that extraordinary journey. He travelled on the sufferance of African rulers and soon came to depend for his survival on the charity of African villagers...

With an Introduction by Ellen Rees, Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo.The plays of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) are critically acclaimed throughout the world. The father of modern drama, Ibsen broke with theatrical conventions and created a more realistic form of drama that used the stage as a forum for debating social problems, notably the rights of the individual, and the damaging effects of orthodoxy. This collection of four plays contains,A Do...

No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau. His central preoccupations – the illusory nature of much of what we call ‘progress’, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal, the moral and political case for non-violence, the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the ‘rules’ b...

Abridged, with an Introduction by Patrick Renshaw.Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn ...

Translated by H. F. Cary With an introduction by Claire Honess.Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian ...

Translated by Yuan Shibing and J.J.L.Duyvendak. With introductions by Robert Wilkinson.The two political classics in this book are the product of a time of intense turmoil in Chinese history. Dating from the Period of the Warring States (403-221BC), they anticipate Machiavelli's The Prince by nearly 2000 years.The Art of War is the best known of a considerable body of Chinese works on the subject. It analyses the nature of war, and reveals how vict...

Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. With an Introduction by Ray Furness.The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche's last lucid months, show him at his most stimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Übermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate, forcing the reader to face unpalatable insights and to rethink every commonly accepted 'truth'. Th...