An Introduction to English Poetry - James Fenton
Another enjoyable one; the emphasis on metre and form. ISBN: 0670911003

The Emperor's Babe - Bernadine Evaristo
A verse novel about a Nubian girl in Roman London. Lively, slangy, moving; a real pageturner. ISBN: 0140297812

Tales from Ovid - Ted Hughes
The title says it all. Good stuff. ISBN: 0571191037

The Sixteen Satires - Juvenal (trans. Peter Green)
A fantastically interesting picture of Classical Rome, in a vivid translation. Read about the gourmets and their enormous turbots. ISBN: 0140447040

An Anthology of Chinese Literature - Stephen Owen (ed.)
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Includes some prose. ISBN: 0393971066

Non-fiction

The Shorter Pepys - Samuel Pepys (ed. Robert Latham)
One of the great London books, sensitively abridged. The Great Fire, the Plague, the Dutch War, and lots of eating of venison pasties and groping of housemaids. ISBN: 0140433767

Coleridge - Early Visions and Coleridge - Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes
A brilliant two-volume biography. Learn why Wordsworth is the devil. ISBN: 0006548415, 0006548423

Darwin - Adrian Desmond, James Moore
Great man, great biography. ISBN: 0140131922

London: the Biography - Peter Ackroyd
A messy and idiosyncratic book, but a full of good anecdote. F'rinstance, when Billingsgate fish market moved in 1982, the old building subsided, because the foundations thawed out for the first time in years.
His biographies of Thomas More, Blake and Dickens are also well worth reading. ISBN: 0099422581

Peasants into Frenchmen - Eugene Weber
Traces the development of rural France in the C19th. Full of extraordinary facts - one of the main things expected of priests was ringing the church bells to deter storms. In 1783 alone 121 bell ringers were killed by lightning. ISBN: 0804710139

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon - Ivan Morris (trans.)
The jottings of a lady-in-waiting in C11th Japan. It brings that culture to life; people flirt from behind paper screens, and send each other poems on paper that has been carefully coloured, scented and tied with appropriate foliage. ISBN: 0140442367

The Private Life of Chairman Mao - Dr Zhisui Li
The inside story of the court of Chairman Mao, as seen by his personal doctor. Mao had a stream of virgins on tap, because he believed in the restorative power of deflowering them (even when recovering from STDs). When he went on long journeys, people would plant the paddyfields near the train-lines with huge numbers of extra rice-plants, so he believed that the harvest was a miraculous success. ISBN: 0099648814

Ten Days That Shook the World - John Reed
A first-hand account of ten days at the start of the Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, written by a contemporary US journalist in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm. Introductions by both Lenin and A. J. P. Taylor. ISBN: 0140182934

The Emperor - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Life in the court of the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. You know that bit in Julius Caesar - 'Let me have men about me that are fat;/Sleek-heeded men and such as sleep o' nights;/Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.'? Apparently, the men who feel happy with their place in the patronage system get cosy and fat - the conspirators look nervous and lose weight.
Amazon seems to think it's out of print, though I bought a copy new about a month ago. Kapuscinski is a superb writer, so if you can't find this one, try some of his others.

Stalingrad - Anthony Beevor
A superb, and deeply moving, account of one of the most unpleasant battles of WWII. What happens when the ruthlessness of a Hitler and a Stalin come into direct conflict in the middle of the Russian winter. ISBN: 0140249850

The Moneymaker - Janet Gleeson
The story of the brilliant Scottish economist/gambler, John Law, who introduced paper money to France, founded the Mississippi Company, and set up the biggest financial bubble in history. Solid, rather than brilliant, writing; but it's one hell of a good story. Makes the recent dot.com boom look a bit lightweight. ISBN: 0553812475

King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild
The story of the Congo Free State, a colony owned personally by King Leopold of the Belgians. He made the equivalent of over $1 billion in today's money; 10 million Congolese died. ISBN: 0618001905

Deterring Democracy - Noam Chomsky
A cutting analysis of U.S. foreign policy as a hypocritical power-game in the name of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Is he a brilliant analyst, an obsessive conspiracy theorist, or something in between? Whatever, his intelligence glitters on the page. ISBN: 0099135019

Popular Science

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman - Richard Feynman
The memoirs of one of the great C20th physicists. Historically interesting (it includes memories of working on the A-bomb at Los Alamos), entertaining, and thought-provoking about the nature of science and its relation to other intellectual disciplines. Everyone should read it. ISBN: 009917331X

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
Interested in language? Read this book. Interested in science or evolution? Read this book. Interested in people? Read this book. If you can't find something stimulating in here, it's time to book a crematorium. ISBN: 0140175296

An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks
This is a semi-random pick because I could have chosen any of his books; Sacks is the best writer of popular science alive. The incredible empathy and humanity he brings to his books about neurology prevents them from becoming a freak-show, despite the undeniable strangeness of the people who are his subject matter. ISBN: 0330320904

Seeing Voices - Oliver Sacks
A special mention for an interesting book slightly off Sacks's usual subjects - about deafness, sign language, and the Deaf community. ISBN: 0330320904

The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
Sex. Why do organisms indulge in such a wasteful activity, instead of just podding off children like amoebae? What have parasite got to do with it? How does it affect our behaviour? ISBN: 0140167722

Parasite Rex - Carl Zimmer
More parasites. He makes the case that the impact of parasites on ecosystems has been grossly under-appreciated; more to the point, the book is full of examples of how sophisticated and interesting these beasties are. The bit about how the parasitic barnacle Sacculina invades the body of its crab host, takes over the nervous system, and turns it into a sexless zombie, is worth the price of admission by itself. ISBN: 074320011X

The Faber Book of Science - John Carey (ed.)
An anthology of about 90 pieces of science writing from Leonardo da Vinci to Miroslav Holub, via Galileo, Van Leeuwenhoek, Faraday, Gosse, Kekule, Huxley, Fabre, Twain, Feynman, Nabokov, Dawkins and a whole load of other people. ISBN: 0571179010

The Unnatural Nature of Science - Lewis Wolpert
An introduction to the philosophy of science as seen by a scientist; including how science differs from technology, and also how it differs from other systems of thought like religion, astrology and whatnot. ISBN: 0571169724

Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
One of the reasons Europeans regarded themselves as superior to the natives of Africa, the Americas and Australia was the ease with which they conquered them. If in fact different races do not significantly differ in ability, how does one explain the enormous difference in material wealth between them when they met each other?
Diamond sets out to answer that question. Drawing on arguments such as the different food-plants and beasts of burden available in different areas, and the way urban areas act as incubators for disease, he comes up with pretty convincing suggestions. Whether he's right or not, it's an interesting book because it bring together different kinds of explanations that could act as an alternative to the superiority-of-the-white-man theory. ISBN: 0099302780

The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould
I'm not a big fan of Gould's writing, but his single-issue books are better than his essays, and this one, about the theoretical flaws of the methods used to measure intelligence, and particularly its abuse in the service of racism, is good stuff.

The Race Gallery - Marek Kohn
About the dubious world of 'racial science' and how it's making a comeback. ISBN: 009941001X

Alan Turing: The Enigma - Andrew Hodges
A biography of Alan Turing, the mathematician who, during WWII, built the first ever programmable computer and masterminded the cracking of the German Enigma code. Having done as much as any single individual to win the war, he ended up committing suicide as he faced prosecution for his homosexuality. ISBN: 0099116413

The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
Dawkins isn't the most likeable man in the world, but it's hard to imagine a better introduction to evolution. It's almost too thorough, though; if you want something a bit shorter, read The Selfish Gene instead. ISBN: 0140144811

Further recommendations, including some fiction, will be added later. Probably.  

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