Virginia Woolf’s essay on women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity is a landmark of feminist thought

Robert Graves’s account of his experiences in the trenches of the first world war is a subversive tour de force

Churchill delights with candid tales of childhood and boy’s own adventures in the Boer war that made him a tabloid hero

The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for

Much admired by Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron’s dazzling, timeless account of a journey to Afghanistan is perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century

George Orwell’s unflinchingly honest account of three northern towns during the Great Depression marks a milestone in the writer’s political development

Cyril Connolly’s dissection of the perils of literary life transformed the contemporary English literary scene

American culinary icon MFK Fisher described the sensual pleasures of the table with elegance and passion

This influential memoir of a rebellious southern boyhood vividly evokes the struggle for African American identity in the decades before civil rights

Hersey’s extraordinary, gripping book tells the personal stories of six people who endured the 1945 atom bomb attack on the Japanese city

The historian’s vivid, terrifying account of the Führer’s demise, based on his postwar work for British intelligence, remains unsurpassed

The controversial critic’s statement on English literature is an entertaining, often shocking, dissection of the novel

This landmark recipe book, a horrified reaction to postwar rationing, introduced cooks to the food of southern Europe and readers to the art of food writing

A bleakly hilarious, enigmatic watershed that changed the language of theatre and still sparks debate six decades on

The great historian of ideas starts with an animal parable and ends, via a dissection of Tolstoy’s work, in an existential system of thought

Kenneth Clark’s survey of the nude from the Greeks to Picasso foreshadows the critic’s towering claims for humanity in his later seminal work, Civilisation

This powerful study of loss asks: ‘Where is God?’, and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise