Penguin Books Australia

The Hell's Angels erupted into 1960s America, paralysing whole towns with fear. Determined to discover the truth behind the terrifying reputation of these marauding biker gangs, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year on the road with the Angels, documenting his hair-raising experiences with Charger Charley, Big Frank, Little Jesus and The Gimp. Hell's Angels was the result: a masterpiece of underground reportage...

Malcolm Gladwell is the master of playful yet profound insight. His ability to see underneath the surface of the seemingly mundane taps into a fundamental human impulse: curiosity. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Malcolm Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising new ways of looking at them, and the world around us.
 

The late Michael King was one of New Zealand's most respected and popular historians. The author of the bestselling The Penguin History of New Zealand and many other significant works, he was a writer of remarkable skill, sensitivity and importance.

A Room of One's Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928. Ranging over Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and why neither of them could have written War and Peace , over the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister, over the effects of poverty and chastity on female creativity, she gives us one of the greatest feminist...

'A good pen can also remind us of the happiest moments in our lives, bring noble ideas into our dens, our blood and our souls. It can turn tragedy into hope and victory.'

—FROM A LETTER TO ZINDZI MANDELA, DATED 10 FEBRUARY 1980

The first wholly accurate and authorised record of Nelson Mandela's most inspiring and historically important quotations.

Describing the surreal hallucinations, insomnia and nightmarish visions he experienced while consuming daily large amounts of laudanum, Thomas De Quincey's legendary account of the pleasures and pains of opium forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, and paved the way for later generations of literary drug-takers from Baudelaire to Burroughs.

In Utopia Thomas More painted a fantastical picture of a distant island where society is perfected and people live in harmony, yet its title means 'no place', and More's hugely influential work was ultimately an attack on his own corrupt, dangerous times, and on the failings of humanity.

'Marvellously funny and horrifyingly mouth-watering'   Rolling Stone

Fundamental to Chinese philosophy and religion, the Tao Te Ching is a simple guidebook for virtue, encouraging peace, understanding and humility. Ranging from political advice to common wisdom, it has also served as an inspiration to artists across the ages and throughout the world.

Blending intellectual speculation with anecdote and personal reflection, the Renaissance thinker and writer Montaigne pioneered the modern essay. This selection contains his idiosyncratic and timeless writings on subjects as varied as the virtues of solitude, the power of the imagination, the pleasures of reading, the importance of sleep and why we sometimes laugh and cry at the same things.

John Locke was one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, whose assertion that reason is the key to knowledge changed the face of philosophy. These writings on thought, ideas, perception, truth and language are some of the most influential in the history of Western thought.

In The War with Hannibal , Livy (59 BC-AD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the immense armies of Hannibal, complete with elephants, crossing the Alps; the panic as they approached the gates of Rome; and the decimation of the Roman army at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Yet it is also the clash of personalities...

A fascinating examination of ethics, religion and psychology, this selection of Schopenhauer's works contains scathing attack on the nature and logic of religion, and an essay on ethics that ranges from the American slavery debate to the vices of Buddhism.

These are unique stories of timeless wisdom and understanding from the Zen Masters. With rich and fascinating tales of swords, tigers, tea, flowers and dogs, the writings of the Masters challenge every perception – and seek to bring all readers closer to enlightenment.

'The most prescient of British public intellectuals'  Pankaj Mishra, Financial Times

'Gray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come … he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt'  Will Self

Why is progress a pernicious myth? Why do beliefs that humanity can be improved end in farce or horror? Is atheism a hangover from Christian faith?

John...