Written around the 6th century BC, The Art of War is one of the oldest books about war and military strategy, and probably the best. For more than two thousand years, Sun-tzu's "The Art of War" has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. Above all, it teaches how, when battles commences, to think on your feet and catch your enemy off guard An elemental part of...

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue by Plato, written in approximately 380 BC. It is one of the most influential works of philosophy and political theory, and Plato's best known work. In Plato's fictional dialogues the characters of Socrates as well as various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether the just man is happier than the unjust man by constructing an imaginary city ruled by philosopher-kings. The dialogue...

The most celebrated work of Dante is the Divine comedy--a vision of hell, purgatory and heaven that provides a strangely surrealistic view of medieval attitudes on religious dogma and the price of disobedience.

‘The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy’ In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts

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Renaissance architect Palladio was one of the most influential figures the field of architecture has ever produced. Of even greater significance than his buildings is this treatise, one of the most important books in the literature of architecture.

"Hildegard of Bingen--visionary, abbess, composer, dramatist, poet and healer--was the brilliant and passionate precursor of many of the great women mystics of the Middle Ages. Her body of work is unusually expansive in terms of genre and subject matter for any theologian of her time, and includes powerful descriptions of her visions, advice to influential nobles and royalty, theological correspondence with fellow monastics, liturgical songs, and...

"Es un lugar común referirse a El arte de la guerra como la versión china de El príncipe y a Sun Tzu como el Maquiavelo oriental, aunque, bien mirado, fueron Sun Tzu y su libro de estrategia los que inspiraron a Maquiavelo. Nadie diera, a la vista de su estructura, su concisión y su estilo tan directo, que esta obra tiene más de dos mil años. Su contenido tiene tanta vigencia hoy como entonces, porque, en el fondo, las siempre acertadas máximas...