Three suggestions rather unlike each other:
Voltaire | Candide | In Voltaire's most popular book, our hero, Candide, who is the bastard nephew of the German Baron who owns the castle where he lives, falls madly in love with the Baron's daughter, Lady Cunegonde. The two of them spend luxurious hours together listening to the philosophical discourses of professor Pangloss, an incurable optimist who believes that th... |
Robert Graves | The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth | Graves' personal life was intensified by his Goddess worship. Writing The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth brought him deep spiritual satisfaction, and by the 1960s, when his popularity as a mythological th... |
Jean Jacques Rousseau | A Discourse on Inequality | What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau asked this question in 1745, and set about answering it in his A Discourse on Inequality (Penguin Classics)... |
