Given in reverse chronological order, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) back to the King James Bible (1611), Robert McCrum’s choices include historical monuments (The Federalist Papers, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman); landmark reference works (Samuel Johnson’s and Noah Webster’s dictionaries, Roget’s first thesaurus); great memoirs (Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Vera Brittain), scientific texts (A Brief History of Time, On the Origin of Species, reportage, polemics; provocative modern choices Barack Obama, Naomi Klein) – and a few WTF titles that’ll make you go, “Wait, that’s not nonfiction!“