Penguin Books Australia

'She stood by the standing-beam, summoned her strength:
her eyes blazed fire, she snorted venom, Brynhild, Budli's daughter'

One of the greatest prodigies of his era, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three, as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father's hand. Intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became a leading Victorian liberal thinker, whose works - including On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography - are among the...

The Leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace and security to be attained? Hobbes's answer is sovereignty, but the resurgence of interest today in Leviathan is due less to its answers than its methods. Hobbes sees politics as a science capable of the same axiomatic approach as geometry: he argues from first principles to human nature to politics.

This book's appeal to the twentieth...

Burke's seminal work was written during the early months of the French Revolution, and it predicted with uncanny accuracy many of its worst excesses, including the Reign of Terror. A scathing attack on the revolution's attitudes to existing institutions, property and religion, it makes a cogent case for upholding inherited rights and established customs, argues for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary...

One of the great classics on democracy, Rights of Man was published in England in 1791 as a vindication of the French Revolution and a critique of the British system of government. In direct, forceful prose, Paine defends popular rights, national independence, revolutionary war, and economic growth - all considered dangerous and even seditious issues. In his introduction Eric Foner presents an overview...

The need for the Six Hats is based on an understanding of how the brain chemicals change with the mode of thinking. Using this method one major corporation reduced the time taken for multinational project discussions from thirty days to just two days.

Communism was one of the most powerful political and intellectual movements of the modern world; at the height of its influence over a third of the world's population lived under Communist rule. And yet very few predicted either its bewildering rise or sudden decline, while even close observers were mystified by its frequent convulsions and turbulent politics.

How can we use our qualities as positive forces in...

' The Dictators is his finest book yet'
Simon Sebag Montefiore

'A masterpiece'
Niall Ferguson, Daily Telegraph , Books of the Year

They presided over the most destructive regimes in history, murdered millions and fought the most barbarous war the world had seen.  Yet countless Germans and Russians worshipped them and the values they stood for.  How did Hitler and Stalin come to cast such...

In Madness Explained leading clinical psychologist Richard Bentall shatters the modern myths that surround psychosis.

Soon China will rule the world.

But in doing so, it will not become more 'Western'.

Martin Jacques' celebrated book overturns conventional thinking about the ascendancy of China, showing how its impact will not just be economic, but cultural. As China's powerful civilization reasserts itself, it will signal the end of the global dominance of the Western nation-state, and a future of 'contested modernity'...

Norman Stone's groundbreaking book was the very first authoritative account of the Russian Front in the First World War to be published in the West. In this now-classic history he dispels the myths surrounding a still relatively little-known aspect of the war, showing bow inefficiency rather than economic shortage led to Russia's desperate privations and eventual retreat.

'A brilliant, lucid insight into the profound implications of modern biological thinking . . . With this book Matt Ridley establishes himself as one of the finest of contemporary science writers' – Bryan Appleyard