The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

For Plato the soul was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. In ‘De Anima’, Plato’s student, Aristotle sought to set out his theory of soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced a masterpiece of philosophical insight.

The ten stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoy’s artistic prowess displayed over five decades – experimenting with prose styles and drawing on his own experiences with humour, realism and compassion. Inspired by his experiences in the army, ‘The Two Hussars’ contrasts a dashing father and his mean-spirited son. Illustrating Tolstoy’s belief that art must serve a moral purpose, ‘What Men Live By’ portrays an angel sent to earth to learn three existential rules of life, and ‘Two Old Men’ shows a peasant abandoning his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to help his neighbours. And in the highly moving ‘Master and Man’, Tolstoy depicts a mercenary merchant travelling with his unprotesting servant through a blizzard to close a business deal – little realizing he may soon have to settle accounts with his maker. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of civilization. David Abulafia’s The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis, and bringing to life pilgrims, pirates, sultans and naval commanders, this is the story of the sea that has shaped much of world history.

The greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, in a brilliant new translation by an award-winning translator The Underdogs is the first great novel about the first great revolution of the twentieth century. Demetrio Macias, a poor, illiterate Indian, must join the rebels to save his family. Courageous and charismatic, he earns a generalship in Pancho Villa’s army, only to become discouraged with the cause after it becomes hopelessly factionalized. At once a spare, moving depiction of the limits of political idealism, an authentic representation of Mexico’s peasant life, and a timeless portrait of revolution, The Underdogs is an iconic novel of the Latin American experience and a powerful novel about the disillusionment of war.