Books that changed the w.., p.1
Books That Changed the World, page 1
Books That Changed the World
The 50 Most Influential Books in Human History
Andrew Taylor
First published in hardback 2008 by Quercus Editions Ltd
This is the ebook edition published in 2014 by
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Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2008, 2014
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Contents
Introduction
The Iliad
c. 8TH CENTURY
Homer
The Histories
5TH CENTURY BC
Herodotus
The Analects
5TH CENTURY BC
Confucius
The Republic
4TH CENTURY BC
Plato
The Bible
2ND CENTURY BC–2ND CENTURY AD
Odes
23–13 BC
Horace
Geographia
c. AD 100–170
Ptolemy
Kama Sutra
2ND OR 3RD CENTURY AD
Mallanaga Vatsyayana
The Qur’an
7TH CENTURY
Canon of Medicine
1025
Avicenna
The Canterbury Tales
1380s–90s
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Prince
1532
Niccolò Machiavelli
Atlas, or, Cosmographic Meditations
1585–95
Gerard Mercator
Don Quixote
1605–15
Miguel de Cervantes
First Folio
1623
William Shakespeare
An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
1628
William Harvey
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
1632
Galileo Galilei
Principia mathematica
1687
Isaac Newton
A Dictionary of the English Language
1755
Samuel Johnson
The Sorrows of Young Werther
1774
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Wealth of Nations
1776
Adam Smith
Common Sense
1776
Thomas Paine
Lyrical Ballads
1798
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Pride and Prejudice
1813
Jane Austen
A Christmas Carol
1843
Charles Dickens
The Communist Manifesto
1848
Karl Marx
Moby-Dick
1851
Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1852
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary
1857
Gustave Flaubert
On the Origin of Species
1859
Charles Darwin
On Liberty
1859
John Stuart Mill
War and Peace
1869
Leo Tolstoy
The Telephone Directory
1878
New Haven District Telephone Company
The Thousand and One Nights
1885
Translated by Sir Richard Burton
A Study in Scarlet
1888
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Interpretation of Dreams
1899
Sigmund Freud
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
1905
Poems
1920
Wilfred Owen
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
1920
Albert Einstein
Ulysses
1922
James Joyce
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
1928
D.H. Lawrence
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1936
John Maynard Keynes
If This is a Man
1947
Primo Levi
Nineteen Eighty-four
1949
George Orwell
The Second Sex
1949
Simone de Beauvoir
The Catcher in the Rye
1951
J.D. Salinger
Things Fall Apart
1958
Chinua Achebe
Silent Spring
1962
Rachel Carson
Quotations from Chairman Mao
1964
Mao Zedong
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
1997
J.K. Rowling
Andrew Taylor is the author of Walking Wounded: the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell; God’s Fugitive: the Life of C. M. Doughty and A Plum in Your Mouth, among a total of ten books. He has worked as a journalist in television, newspapers and magazines in Britain and the Middle East.
Introduction
How can we ever change the world? Military leaders, such as Genghis Khan or Napoleon have certainly managed to change large parts of it, though generally not for as long as they expected; scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can spread a more benign influence across whole continents; the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers, like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Plato or Confucius, can sweep through generations like fire. But books?
Reading books is generally a solitary, unassuming pastime: bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action qualities that seem to shake the world by the scruff of its neck. The pen may boast of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though, which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can be bullied, imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their books burned, but over the long sweep of history, it is books and the ideas expressed within them that have transformed the world.
From the first cave paintings 30,000 years ago, the passing on of thoughts and ideas from one person to another, from one generation to another, has been the key to civilization. For centuries, this could only be done by painstakingly copying one manuscript to another, or by memorizing long screeds of poetry – the works of Homer, for instance, survived for maybe 200 years before being written down. Then there was the transformative technology of print, first in the East, much later in the West. The Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text printed in China in AD 868, is thought to be the oldest printed book surviving, pre-dating Gutenberg’s Bible in Europe by nearly six centuries. With print, philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists and poets could pass on their ideas – about life, about the world, about eternity and the present moment, about the way that people have thought and behaved in the past, and about how they always think and behave – to hundreds, even thousands of people at a time.
As a result, people who may never have heard of the Flemish cartographer Mercator of Rupelmonde still carry in their heads today a picture of the world that he devised 400 years ago; Odysseus, Don Quixote and Ebenezer Scrooge are familiar characters to children to whom the names of Homer, Cervantes and Dickens may mean nothing. The patient on the operating table may not know about William Harvey, but he has good reason to be grateful for The Motion of the Heart and Blood; because of the compilers of Shakespeare’s First Folio, people who have never seen his plays may still describe themselves as ‘tongue-tied’ or tell others they are ‘living in a fool’s paradise’. In great ways and small, books spread their influence, even among those who never turn their pages.
But which books? There are few better ways of starting an argument than producing a list, whether it purports to rank the best opera singers, the most influential politicians or the greatest footballers, and I have been left in no doubt over the last few months about the passion with which people will defend favourite books and authors whom they feel to have been unjustly excluded. About some on the list, like the Bible and the Qur’an, Shakespeare’s First Folio and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, there can be little argument – but where are Euclid’s Elements or Thomas More’s Utopia? Eliot, either George or T.S., depending on your point of view? How could you choose Dickens’s A Christmas Carol rather than Bleak House or David Copper field? Or The Pickwick Papers? What about Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft?
The answer is that any list can only be subjective. These are the books that, in their different ways, have changed my world – but they are also books that I
Of course there are others – you could compile a list of a thousand books that have changed the world, and someone would still hold up the thousand-and-first, demanding indignantly how it could have been left out – but these fifty have helped to make the world what it is today.
Will they, or any books, help to make the world what it becomes tomorrow? Will books even exist by the end of the 21st century? Back in the 9th century, no doubt, some elderly Chinese intellectual complained grumpily that this newfangled printing nonsense would spell the end of calligraphy and the handwritten manuscript – and today, there are increasing predictions of the end of the book as we know it. Increasingly, books glow softly on the screen of a computer or a hand-held device, with the fingertip turning of each ‘page’ reliant on a piece of behind-the-scenes electronic wizardry. Where yesterday’s scholars struggled with a dozen or so books in a shoulder bag, today’s schoolchildren can carry hundreds in a laptop or a tablet.
But whatever changes come in the future will only be in the way the writing is presented. The words will survive. Future generations may see them differently, but whether they are printed in books, electronically reproduced on screen, or handwritten on parchment scrolls, these fifty books will still be read a hundred years from now, and a hundred years from then. They have changed the world, and they will continue to do so.
The Iliad
c. 8TH CENTURY BC
Homer
The Iliad is the oldest work of poetry in the Western world. Conventionally credited to Homer sometime in the 8th or 9th century BC, it underpinned the astonishing flowering of Greek culture from the 5th century BC onwards, a culture that – via the Romans and the Renaissance – lies at the heart of Western civilization.
This epic poem adopts the ‘hexameter’, a form of stately poetic metre that later became known as ‘heroic verse’, though it was a form rarely adopted by English poets. Its subject is both a great military campaign and a single man. In its 24 books, it tells the story of the ten-year Greek siege of Troy, which followed the abduction of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, by Paris, the son of the Trojan King Priam; but it also concentrates on one brief episode in the final year of the siege.
More specifically, it describes a quarrel in the Greek camp between Menelaus’s brother, King Agamemnon, and the Greek champion Achilles, over Agamemnon’s seizure of a captive slave girl. As a result, the Greeks are defeated in an assault on the city as Achilles and his forces keep out of the fight. Eventually, he relents and sends his friend Patroclus to rescue the struggling Greeks. When Patroclus is killed by Hector, another Trojan prince, Achilles joins the battle in a fury, kills Hector and defiles his body by dragging it behind his horse outside the city walls. Eventually, with the Greeks victorious, Hector’s grieving father, King Priam pays a ransom.
In this passage, near the end of the Iliad, Achilles finally agrees to return Hector’s body to Priam, who has come in disguise to the Greek camp. When Achilles praises Priam’s ‘heart of steel’, there is an ironic echo of Hector’s dying words to him. At last, the pitiless champion has attained the ability to feel sympathy.
Alas, what weight of anguish hast thou known,
Unhappy prince! Thus guardless and alone
To pass through foes, and thus undaunted face
The man whose fury has destroyed thy race!
Heaven sure has armed thee with a heart of steel,
A strength proportioned to the woes you feel.
Rise, then: let reason mitigate your care:
To mourn avails not: man is born to bear.
Such is, alas! The gods’ severe decree:
They, only they are blest, and only free
… Lo! To thy prayer restored, thy breathless son;
Extended on the funeral couch he lies;
And soon as morning paints the eastern skies,
The sight is granted to thy longing eyes.
THE ILIAD, BOOK 14, TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER POPE, 1720
The epic ends with the funeral of Hector.
The poem is traditionally thought of as the greater of a pair by Homer, the other being the Odyssey, an account of the journey back to Greece of the Greek commander Odysseus, who also figures in the Iliad. The story the Iliad, which tells of military virtues and the dealings between gods and men, was treated by the later Ancient Greeks as a kind of defining history, and knowledge of the poem was considered an essential part of a young man’s education. It is possible that it was dictated by its author to a scribe; however, it may well be that the poem’s 15,000 lines were not written down for decades after their original composition, having been composed to be recited from memory – probably in several sessions. By the 6th century BC, written versions did exist and were used at the Panathenaea, the great five-yearly festivals of poetry and athletics held in Athens.
The Iliad’s influence continued – helped by the editorial efforts of later Greek scholars who collated existing versions – through the Roman Empire, and Virgil’s Aeneid, written around 25 BC, was an attempt to create a Roman myth to match Homer’s. The earliest surviving full manuscript of the Iliad was written during the 10th century AD and is believed to have been brought west from Constantinople (Istanbul) some 500 years later. A printed version appeared in 1488, and Homer was gradually rediscovered by the humanist scholars who were learning Greek.
Its literary legacy is huge. In its dramatic conflicts, the Iliad prefigures the great historical and tragic works of Western theatre, another art form with its roots firmly in the Greek world. In the intertwined conflicts of individual soldiers, armies and gods, and in the subtle interplay between the pride, bitterness, anger and savage remorse of Achilles, it has the beginnings of the fascination with plot and character which, centuries later, would feed the development of the novel. And the intensity of the poem’s language looks forward to the whole range of European poetry, not just the long narrative epic.
Among its great and enduring themes are the relationship between men and the gods, the fragility of human life and the nature of warfare. Most of all, however, it is a poem about fury – the fury of military combat, the passionate anger of a proud man who believes he has been wronged, and the wrath that is engendered when each of two implacable sides believes in its own rightness.
Little is known about Homer himself. Early Greek legends suggested that he was blind, and that he may have been a wandering aoidos, or singer, who would have recited his work, accompanying himself on the lyre, to the guests at great feasts. We know that the Ancient Greeks themselves confidently ascribed the Iliad and the Odyssey to him – although they also credited him with many other works that modern experts agree could not possibly have been written by the same man. By the 5th century BC, various authors were writing his biography, although none of the ‘facts’ they included can be verified.
So what can we deduce about the Iliad’s author? It is likely, although not certain, that he would have been illiterate and would have composed his poems orally, for recitation. Linguistic evidence from within the poems, and descriptions of particular artefacts, suggest that they date from later than 1000 BC and before 700 BC. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are written in a dialect that was spoken in Ionia, on the western coast of modern Turkey. This is at least consistent with the traditional account that Homer was born on the island of Chios in the eastern Aegean, although other islands also claim to be his birthplace.
There remain, however, arguments about whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by the same man, although the Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested in the 4th century BC that the Iliad seemed to have been written in the poet’s maturity, and the Odyssey in his middle age. Further than that, though, we do not even know whether either poem had a single author, or was rather an accretion of versions by unnamed and unknown poets adding to each other’s work over the centuries.
About Agamemnon, Achilles and the Greek siege of Troy, too, there is little certainty. Do the poems – almost certainly based on tales and legends that were already centuries old – carry echoes of the exploits of real people in a real military campaign? Archaeological excavations, particularly at the ancient city of Hisarlik on the Turkish coast, have revealed a succession of settlements on the site, which might correspond with ancient Troy, or ‘Ilion’ as the Greeks knew it. In its last incarnation, this city seems to have been destroyed by fire around 1250 BC, which roughly corresponds with Ancient Greek historians’ dating of the Trojan War.
