With the exception of the terrible retreat from Afghanistan, none of England's many little wars have been so fatal in proportion to the number of those engaged as our first expedition to Burma. The Burman policy of carrying off every boat on the river, laying waste the whole country, and driving away the inhabitants and the herds, maintained our army as prisoners in Rangoon through the first wet season; and caused the loss of half the white officers and men first sent there.

First published in 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the most influential works of pioneering psychologist Sigmund Freud. Focusing on the tension between the primitive drives of the individual and the demands of civilization for order and conformity, Freud draws upon his psychoanalytic theories to explain the fundamental structures, conflicts, and consequences of society.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which appeared first in 1901 and was then expanded in a series of subsequent editions, has proved to be one of Freud's most popular works, and one of his most influential during his lifetime. It was here that he proposed that many slips and errors of memory common to the average man in everyday life actually signals unconscious issues that beset the individual, and, if examined, can be extremely revealing.

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud is one of the most significant books of the 20th century. Though dreams and their role in human consciousness have been a continuing thread in religion and art and life down the centuries, Freud's look at the subject through the prism of his emerging practice and study of psychoanalysis provided a startlingly new and challenging perspective.

This series of 28 lectures was given by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, during the First World War and first published in English in 1920. The purpose of this general introduction was to present his work and ideas - as they had matured at that point - to a general public; and even though there was to be considerable development and change over the ensuing years, these talks still offer a valuable and remarkably approachable entry point to his revolutionary concepts.

Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.

The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too-human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist.

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to rarely seen personal letters and papers, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

When the narrator of Swann's Way dips a petite madeleine into hot tea, the act transports him to his childhood in the French town of Combray. Out of his Pandora's box of reflections comes a memory of an old family friend, Swann - a man who was long ago undone by romantic desire and cruel reality. In this reverie lie the insights the author seeks about his own life and ageless truths about the ephemeral nature of emotions, places, and, ultimately, love.

Carl Jung's Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology gathers in one volume some of his most important and influential shorter writings, and also some pieces that, from our perspective almost a century later, seem quaint or even idiosyncractic. The volume provides wonderful insight into his mind and thought as he reached a position of prominence in the world of psychoanalysis.

In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness. In 20 short chapters, each of which explores a question prompted by Austen’s novels, Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most in her beloved fiction.

Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise.

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as any of his adventures.