By Aristotle
Read by James Cameron Stewart
10 hours 37 minutes
Poetics and Rhetoric are the two major works by Aristotle which, after more than 2,000 years, remain key behavioural handbooks for anyone interested in story, performance, presentation and indeed psychology. The continuing influence of Poetics, for example, is readily discernible even among the scriptwriters of Hollywood! Continue Reading →
By Aristotle
Read by James Cameron Stewart
14 hours 30 minutes
Aristotle’s Metaphysics was the first major study of the subject of metaphysics – in other words, an inquiry into ‘first philosophy’, or ‘wisdom’. It differs from ‘Physics’ which is concerned with the natural world: things which are subject to the laws of nature, things that move and change, are measurable. Continue Reading →
By Sigmund Freud
Read by Derek Le Page
8 hours 52 minutes
Here are three key works by Sigmund Freud which, published in the first decades of the 20th century, underpinned his developing views and had such a dramatic effect on world society. In the uncompromising Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he declared that ‘sexual aberrations’ are not limited to the insane but exist in ‘normal’ people to a greater or lesser degree. Continue Reading →
translated by Charlotte Guest
Read Richard Mitchley
10 hours 12 minutes
The Mabinogion, the earliest literary jewel of Wales, is a collection of ancient tales and legends compiled around the 12th and 13th century deriving from storytelling and the songs of bards handed down over the ages. It is a remarkable document in many ways. From an historical perspective, it is the earliest prose literature of Britain. Continue Reading →
By Samuel Beckett
Read Dermot Crowley
5 hours 20 minutes
How It Is, a landmark in 20th century literature, is one of the most challenging of Samuel Beckett’s early novels. He published it first in French in 1961 and then in his own translation in 1964. He explained in a letter that it was the outpouring of a “‘man’ lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him… Continue Reading →
AGAINST NATUREBy Joris-Karl Huysmans
Read Nicholas Boulton
7 hours 56 minutes
Against Nature (A Rebours) was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884 it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel, (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence; and it was just this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society. Continue Reading →
WattBy Samuel Beckett
Read by Dermot Crowley
10 hours 5 minutes
Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other ‘has its place in the series’ – those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Continue Reading →
By Sigmund Freud
Read by Derek Le Page
8 hours 6 minutes
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which appeared first in 1901 and was then expanded in a series of subsequent editions, has proved to be one of Freud’s most popular works, and one of his most influential during his lifetime. It was here that he proposed that many slips and errors of memory common to the average man in everyday life actually signals unconscious issues that beset the individual, and, if examined, can be extremely revealing. Continue Reading →
THE PRAISE OF FOLLY / AGAINST WARBy Desiderius Erasmus
Read by Georgina Sutton, Leighton Pugh
6 hours
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was known as Prince of the Humanists – though a theologian, a Catholic priest and the leading European scholar of his time. A close friend of Sir Thomas More, Erasmus’s writings had a strong influence on the growing movement for change in Christian Europe, both Lutheran and the Counter-Reformation. Continue Reading →
By John Stuart Mill
Read by Derek Le Page
8 hours 49 minutes
John Stuart Mill (1808-1873) was a torch-bearer for liberal thought in the 19th century: liberty of the individual, freedom of speech, a champion for women’s suffrage in Parliament. A remarkable man – he learnt Greek aged three, and by eight had read Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato – he campaigned all his life for a just society. Continue Reading →
THE LETTERS OF PLINY THE YOUNGER By Pliny the Younger
Read by Leighton Pugh
12 hours 40 minutes
Pliny the Younger (61 CE -c113 CE) was a well-connected official in the Rome of the 1st century, and it is through his ten Books of letters that we have one of the liveliest and most informal pictures of the period. As a lawyer and magistrate he rose through the senate to become consul in 100 AD, and therefore corresponded with leading figures including the historian Tacitus, the biographer Suetonius, the philosophers Artemidorus and Euphrates the Stoic and most notably the Emperor Trajan. Continue Reading →
LAND OF MEN (Wind Sand and Stars)By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Read by Nicholas Boulton
5 hours 18 minutes
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is known universally for the gentle charm of Le Petit Prince, but it is this book, Land of Men – known originally in English as Wind, Sand and Stars – which is his masterpiece. First published in 1939, it documents Saint-Exupéry’s life as a pilot in the pioneering days of long-distance flying and in particular his experiences as a pilot transporting mail across countries, across continents. Continue Reading →
By Tacitus
Read by Leighton Pugh
4 hours 49 minutes
These three vibrant texts show different sides of the Roman historian Tacitus (c56–c102 CE) best known for his principal (and much longer) legacies of The Annals and The Histories. Agricola was a successful general and Governor of Britain (77-83CE), a task which he carried out with firmness and probity – in contrast to much of the corruption and repression in place during the reign of Emperor Domitian. Continue Reading →
An Introduction to Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of LifeBy T. Bailey Saunders
Read by David Rintoul
42 minutes
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a key influence on a wide range of major 19th and 20th century figures who followed him including Nietzsche, Schrödinger, Freud, Tolstoy, Wagner, Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett. This was despite his reputation for being gloomy and pessimistic! Continue Reading →
THE WISDOM OF LIFE, COUNSELS AND MAXIMSBy Arthur Schopenhauer
Read by David Rintoul
9 hours 22 minutes
‘The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.’
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century because his humanistic, atheistic if pessimistic views chimed with a new secularism that was emerging from a Western society dominated by religion. Despite his rather forbidding image, (and a few outdated views) he is one of the most approachable of German philosophers and this is certainly evident in these two key works, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. Continue Reading →
THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHYBy Anicius Manlius Severinus BOETHIUS
Read by David Rintoul
4 hours 55 minutes
The Consolation of Philosophy is one of the key works in the rich tradition of Western philosophy, partly because of the circumstances in which it was written. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c480-c524) was of aristocratic Roman birth and became consul and then Master of Offices at Ravenna, one of the highest posts under the Ostrogothic Roman ruler Theodoric. But Boethius was unjustly charged with treason in 524 and this led to house arrest, then torture and execution. Continue Reading →
By Thomas Mann
Read by David Rintoul
26 hours 48 minutes
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family – a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck. Continue Reading →
MURPHYBy Samuel Beckett
Read by Stephen Hogan
6 hours 51 minutes
‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’ So opens Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first novel, published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Continue Reading →
LE GRAND MEAULNES (The Wanderer)
By Alain-Fournier
Read by John Hollingworth
6 hours 57 minutes
He says little about his adventure on his return. But François eventually discovers that Meaulnes stumbled upon a strange party held at an unknown chateau, and became enmeshed in the lives of the beautiful young Yvonne de Galais and her brother Frantz. Continue Reading →
THE SORRROWS OF YOUNG WERTHERBy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read by Leighton Pugh
4 hours 32 minutes
Werther, a sensitive young artist, finds himself in Wahlheim, a quiet attractive village in Germany where he seeks solace from the turmoils of love. It is a ‘young spring’ and he hopes that arcadian solitude will prove ‘a genial balm’ to his mind. But his romantic tendency rules otherwise, and he falls in love with Charlotte – Lotte – even though he knows she is affianced to another. Continue Reading →
