Secondhand History & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2887

Secondhand History & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2887

Eight Past Masters from Oxford anchor the bottom of the box, with four Fontana History of Europe volumes, Pepys's Diary, and Galbraith, Peter Fleming, and Erich Heller on Kafka filling the rows above. A serious box for the serious general reader.

1. Rome and the Mediterranean — Livy (Penguin Classics) — the third and fourth decades of Livy's history, covering Rome's wars with Macedon and Syria.
2. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective — Peter L. Berger (Pelican) — a celebrated and accessible introduction to sociological thinking, still widely read and taught.
3. From Humanism to Science 1480–1700 — Robert Mandrou — a cultural history of the transition from Renaissance humanism to the scientific revolution.
4. The Non-potable Scotch — J.K. Galbraith (Penguin) — Galbraith's witty and affectionate memoir of the Scots who settled in Canada.
5. Portrait of India — Ved Mehta (Pelican) — Mehta's wide-ranging portrait of India in the years after independence, rich with people and places.
6. Revolutionary Europe 1783–1815 — George Rudé (Fontana History of Europe) — from the French Revolution to the fall of Napoleon, in the landmark Fontana series.
7. Europe between Revolutions 1815–1848 — Jacques Droz (Fontana History of Europe) — the Restoration era and the forces gathering beneath its surface.
8. The Symphony: Haydn to Dvorak — ed. Robert Simpson — a critical survey of the symphony from its classical origins through the Romantic period.
9. Shakespeare: The Poet and His Background — Peter Quennell (Penguin Shakespeare Library) — a biographical and cultural account of Shakespeare's life and the world that formed him.
10. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play — Anne Righter (Penguin Shakespeare Library) — a scholarly study of how the play-within-a-play and the concept of theatre function in Shakespeare's work.
11. The Road to Xanadu — John Livingston Lowes (Vintage) — the legendary scholarly investigation into the literary sources of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner.
12. Kafka — Erich Heller (Fontana Modern Masters, ed. Frank Kermode) — a concise and penetrating critical study of Kafka's work and its philosophical dimensions.
13. Samuel Pepys: Diary — a hardback edition of the celebrated seventeenth-century diary, the most intimate record of Restoration London in existence.
14. The Siege at Peking — Peter Fleming — Fleming's vivid account of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and the fifty-five day siege of the foreign legations.
15. Tocqueville in America — George Wilson Pierson, abridged by Dudley C. Lunt — the classic record of Tocqueville's journey through America, the thinking that became Democracy in America.
16. Life in Russia — Michael Binyon (Doubleday Anchor) — an insider account of Soviet daily life by the Times correspondent in Moscow.
17. Coleridge — Richard Holmes (Past Masters, OUP) — Holmes's concise and characteristically vivid introduction to Coleridge's life and ideas.
18. Cobbett — Raymond Williams (Past Masters, OUP) — Williams on the radical journalist and agrarian campaigner who defined rural England.
19. Proust — Derwent May (Past Masters, OUP) — a short, lucid introduction to Proust's life, his novel, and his ideas.
20. Carlyle — A.L. Le Quesne (Past Masters, OUP) — an account of the Victorian sage who shaped so much of the century's intellectual and political life.
21. Thomas More — Anthony Kenny (Past Masters, OUP) — Kenny's introduction to More as philosopher, humanist, and martyr.
22. Bayle — Elisabeth Labrousse (Past Masters, OUP) — a study of Pierre Bayle, the great seventeenth-century sceptic and pioneer of toleration.
23. Diderot — Peter France (Past Masters, OUP) — an introduction to Diderot's extraordinary range as philosopher, novelist, and encyclopedist.
24. Rhetoric — Peter Dixon (Critical Idiom) — a concise guide to the history, theory, and practice of rhetoric.