The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
The book that gave us the meme — and a whole way of thinking about life.
Must-read books
18 essential books worth reading for their ideas, insight and enduring relevance. Each title opens a full background page in a new tab, so this list stays where you left it.
Ideas and science
The books the best long-form conversations keep circling back to.
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
Why good explanations, not data, are the engine of human progress.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
A lifetime of research into how reliably wrong our instincts are.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
Contested in places, but it changed how a generation treats the night.
History and civilisation
Long arcs, told by people who did the archive work.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
Seventy thousand years at a brisk pace, argued rather than recited.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Mary Beard
Rome without the toga-drama: politics, plumbing and power.
Fingerprints of the Gods
Graham Hancock
The lost-civilisation case that half this directory keeps arguing about.
The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
Reporting as moral argument — still the template for honest witness.
Power, markets and meaning
How things actually get built, bought and believed.
The Power Broker
Robert A. Caro
1,200 pages on one unelected man. The best book on power ever written.
Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things that gain from disorder — and why most institutions don't.
Zero to One
Peter Thiel
Contrarian start-up thinking, condensed to a lecture you can finish in a night.
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
The short book that outlasts almost everything written about purpose since.
12 Rules for Life
Jordan B. Peterson
Argue with it if you like — millions of listeners started here.
The Glittering Legacy and History of Gold
Andrew Mortimer
Gold from the birth of the atom to its role today as the oldest store of value.
Gold: Everything You Need to Know
Ian Plimer
A geologist's account of how gold forms, how it's found, and why it still rules.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz
Running a company when there is no good answer — the honest version of start-up life.
The Ascent of Money
Niall Ferguson
A financial history of the world, from Babylonian clay tablets to the credit crunch.
Material World
Ed Conway
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium: the six substances the modern world runs on.