Includes essays that discuss the nature of books and literature as a moral imperative and explore the consequences of society's betrayal of its readers and writers. This title covers writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and G K Chesterton, as well as Che Guevara and Goethe.

This study of the history of reading goes from the earliest examples of the clay tablets and cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt via the invention of printing in the 15th century to the birth of a mass reading public and today's digital revolution. It argues that it is the demands and expectations of the reader, acting alongside the creative will of the writer, that is the evolutionary motor of literary forms and genres. From man's first use of the written word simply as a form of reference, to the emergence of the first holy or devotional texts, and onto the development of fictions,...

Ronald Wright has created the best travel book about Peru, for he has immersed himself in the music and language, as well as the history, politics and monuments of the indigenous Andean cultures of South America, in a way that no other travel writer has yet managed.