Paul Graham

Out of print; Graham distributes it free as a PDF

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

How the stirrup and the plough reorganised medieval society and economy

Argues that the Arab conquests ended Roman Europe and opened the Dark Ages.

Nearly a thousand years of Islamic rule in Spain from 711, and its mark on Europe.

Maps in sequence of peoples in Europe and the Near East, from 50,000 BC to AD 362.

Drawn reconstructions of buildings that open up two ancient cities and their people.

The 1578 battle in Morocco that destroyed Portugal's King Sebastian and his army.

How American life changed between 1900 and 1950.

How the shipping container cut freight costs and remade global trade.

Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade; the medieval West African economy

An interpretation of the New Deal and of the historians who have written on it.

Pre-industrial English society before wage labour and cities

Bertie and Jeeves help, and sometimes hinder, the love-struck Bingo Little.

A novel of the quest to destroy a ring of power that corrupts all who use it.

Carnegie's rise from a bobbin boy of thirteen to the richest man in the world.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

The definitive account of John Boyd and the OODA loop. Boyd's contribution was to show that strategy is fundamentally about time and adaptation: the side that observes, orients, decides, and acts faster keeps the opponent reacting rather than acting. His ideas crossed into business, software, and lean manufacturing.

A boyhood of boarding schools, beatings, expulsion, attempted suicide and prison.

A comic memoir of a boyhood on Corfu with an odd family and the island's wildlife.

A printer's rise in colonial America and his chart for practising thirteen virtues.

Out of print; Graham distributes it free as a PDF

The theory, techniques and uses of partial evaluation, which specialises programs.

Essays on software design, programming and the businesses around them.

MIT's introductory computer science text, taught through Lisp and Scheme.

Essays on open-source software and its model of collaborative development.

The life of Claude Shannon, whose information theory underlies the digital age.

A first-hand account of the race against Linus Pauling to find DNA's structure.

Species change over time as natural selection favours heritable variations.

How the Copernican revolution unfolded, as a turning point in scientific thought.

Selection acts on genes; bodies are vehicles that genes build to copy themselves.

Science moves through long stretches of normal work broken by paradigm shifts.

An institutionalist study of American business firms and labour organisations.

How large corporations run by a technostructure of experts plan rather than compete.

Hedge funds from Alfred Winslow Jones in 1949 through Soros, Robertson and beyond.

A microeconomic history of American business from 1914 to 1984.

Revolutions in power, transport, communication and organisation that made big firms.

The Morgan banks from 1830s London to J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley in the 1980s.

A philosopher defines bullshit by setting it apart from lying and humbug.

A father and son's motorcycle trip framing an inquiry into what Quality means.

Management as production: a manager's output is the output of the team they lead.

A short history of the joint stock company, from trading charters to multinationals.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

How salaried managers replaced markets in coordinating US business, 1840 to 1920.

Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.

Venture capital from Arthur Rock to SoftBank, and why a few big bets pay for all.

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

The broad lines of European military history from 378 to 1515.

Interviews with German generals of the Second World War and their military lessons.

Lives of the painters, sculptors and architects of the Italian Renaissance.

Fifteenth-century Italian painting, and reading social history from its style.

Google's technical and business decisions from Stanford research to 2011.

A Data General team races to design a 32-bit minicomputer in about a year.

The Ford Motor Company from 1903 to the end of the 20th century.

Writing advice focused on the fears and habits that stop people writing.

King's memoir of craft applies as directly to screenwriting as to fiction. His argument that story comes before plot — that you discover what a story is about by following characters rather than outlining — sits in productive tension with the structural approaches of McKee and Snyder.

How plague, cholera, malaria and smallpox shaped history.

Techniques for handling people, being liked and winning others to your view.

Lessons from IBM's OS/360: why adding people to a late software project slows it.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.