In Macbeth, or "the Scottish play" as actors sometimes refer to it, William Shakespeare fictionalizes the historical account of King Macbeth, ruler of Scotland from 1040 until his death in 1057. In Shakespeare's drama, Macbeth is urged on b...

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squi...

Considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, The Tragedy of King Lear is based on the life of King Leir, a legendary king of Britain who is said to have had the longest reign of all that line of monarchs at sixty years. In Shakespeare's...

Quite simply the greatest writer of all time, Shakespeare belongs on every bookshelf. You might be surprised by some of the stories you never knew.This complete and unabridged edition contains every word that Shakespeare wrote — all 37 trag...

Directing his polemics against the pedantry of his time, Galileo, as his own popularizer, addressed his writings to contemporary laymen. His support of Copernican cosmology, against the Church's strong opposition, his development of a teles...

Robert Hooke's hypotheses concerning the origin of terrestrial features were of major importance to the development of geology. This book interprets Hooke's Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes, and Subterraneous Eruptions (1667-1694). Th...

The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In his monumental 1687 work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time,...

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote island, encountering savages,...

Baron Munchausen is a fictional German nobleman created by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in his 1785 book Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The character is loosely based on a real baron,...

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is a novel by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. Swift's mas...

The Prophecies of Daniel and The Apocalypse. This fascinating and little known work of Sir Isaac Newton has been fully re-typeset and includes three colour plates (one of Thornhill's portrait of Newton, and two of Woolsthorpe Manor) and a f...

Julien Offray de La Mettrie 1709-1751) is the first modern materialist. His Man a Machine is a passionate, popular presentation of materialism and atheism, more provocative than any earlier work. One of the leading physicians of his time, L...

Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, first published in 1751, was the third of David Hume's major philosophical treatises. Hume's aim in this elegant and lucid work was to present in a...

Somewhere between tales and polemics, these funny, ribald, and inventive pieces show Voltaire doing what he does best: brilliantly challenging received wisdom, religious intolerance, and naïve optimism. Traveling through strange environment...

Principal Writings on Religion Including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Natural History of Religion. David Hume is one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. His skeptical accounts of th...