In these two classic essays of feminist literature, Woolf argues passionately for women's intellectual freedom and their role in challenging the drive towards fascism and conflict. She raises questions concerning militarism, education, and social and gender inequality that are relevant to this day.

Rousseau was both a central figure of the European Enlightenment and its most formidable critic. This study of his works, across a range of disciplines, shows how his thinking and writing were inspired by an ideal of humanity's self-realization in a condition of unfettered freedom.

Edward FitzGerald's version of the Rubaiyat of the medieval Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam contains some of the most frequently quoted - and beautiful - lines in English poetry. Daniel Karlin's richly annotated edition does justice to the scope and complexity of FitzGerald's lyrical meditation on 'human death and fate'.

The first major synthesis of the evidence for Anglo-Saxon settlements from across England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and a study of what it reveals about the communities who built and lived in them.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is one of the most famous and important philosophers of the twentieth century. In this account of his life and work A. C. Grayling introduces both his technical contributions to logic and philosophy, and his wide-ranging views on education, politics, war, and sexual morality.

A panoramic account of the Russian empire from the last years of the nineteenth century, through revolution and civil war, to the brutal collectivization and crash industrialization under Stalin in the late 1920s