"Felicity Cloake goes on a culinary odyssey around Britain in search of the perfect breakfast. She eats every breakfast that comes in her path: porridge, oatcakes, crumpets, the full English, the Ulster breakfast, kedgeree, kippers. You name it, she ate it." fivebooks.com/best-books/f...

"Presidential biographies are generally written by historians or by journalists. The journalists tend to get the personal side right; the historians tend to get the historical side right. The best presidential biographies get both right—the life and the times." fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

“Mr Sammler’s Planet is really the first and only great classic of neoconservatism” fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

“There is always that tension between family and career.” fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

"The war on drugs is a government policy that began exactly a hundred years ago in the US and Britain. It’s the belief that the correct way to respond to drug use and drug addiction is to try, at least in theory, to wipe these chemicals from the face of the earth. " fivebooks.com/best-books/w...

"Apollo is an example of something that was impossible that we rose to the challenge of. One nation, a melting pot of people from all over the world, came together to do this impossible thing." fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

"Sport is a place of transcendence, like the arts, and I think a lot of cultures and societies around the world have an intuitive understanding of that." fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

"I remember how surprised I was, in my first few days, that it did not look that terrible. Eventually I came to realise that it was indeed a very bad, very brutal dictatorship, but most people had a normal life nonetheless." fivebooks.com/best-books/n...

"There was a line of approach to Virginia Woolf around themes of childhood sexual abuse, around themes of the treatment of madness in her lifetime." fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

"King’s is extremely fortunate that we received a gift for seven million pounds from the family of an alumnus, Mark Yeoh, to establish a centre for politics, philosophy, and law." fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

"John Kinsella is terrifyingly sharp and astute and poetically eloquent. He doesn’t miss anything, in his poetry or anyone else’s." fivebooks.com/best-books/f...

"The hot-house atmosphere of a university campus or boarding school presents a fitting backdrop for novels exploring ambition, power dynamics, crushes, and sexual crises." fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

"Dickens had various troubled periods of his life. He used the walks as a form of research – and as a form of de-programming himself from the long hours he spent intensely writing." fivebooks.com/best-books/l...

“It’s not actually a puzzle at all; it’s a reorientation of literacy” fivebooks.com/best-books/p...

"Trying to fit in adventure or wildness or nature, or just fresh air—whichever of those appeals to you to—round the margins of our busy days is really important." fivebooks.com/best-books/l...

“Everybody should have the skill of thinking computationally” fivebooks.com/best-books/p...

"She grappled with the issues of socialism, communism, Africa in turmoil, and yet at the same time she lusted for men and talked about the confusions of her love affairs." fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

"The ethics of parenting as I see it looks at the question of what special responsibilities we have to our children, over and above the responsibilities we have to everyone else, just because we’re human beings." fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

"In guerrilla warfare you get in fast, do what’s necessary and get out. As opposed to the more massed forms of warfare, which entail elaborate strategies and entire armies." fivebooks.com/best-books/j...

“There are a lot of people who sincerely believe that the unexamined life is not worth living. The contrasting sentiment is that the unlived life is not worth examining.” fivebooks.com/best-books/v...

Those who love historical fiction have plenty of choice among the list of past Booker Prize-winning novels: fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

"The order is subject, then object, and then the verb comes at the end, so translation could be really challenging, because until you listen to the last bit, you don’t know whether the sentence would be negative or positive." fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

"A coffee table book needs to be an object of beauty, but to be recommended by experts on Five Books it also needs to be informative and enlightening." fivebooks.com/category/art...

"If you read the court speeches of Cicero, for example, you see exactly the same kind of moral and ethical problems being confronted within his historical matrix as we face today – by analogy at least." fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

"The African colonial experience is very different – it’s a much more brutal and rapacious kind of colonialism with much less respect involved.” fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

"We have accepted that society as a whole has to look after people in sickness and in health." fivebooks.com/best-books/j...

"All of Toad’s adventures end up with him trying to recapture his home, so that is very much a central theme to the book." fivebooks.com/best-books/m...

"Taylor Swift is the most powerful bargainer in music today, the most popular recording artist and touring artist in the Western world, and she couldn’t get control of her masters back." fivebooks.com/best-books/c...

NEW: We asked Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn to put together a selection of the most exciting new fiction being published in early 2026. fivebooks.com/best-books/m...

"It just happens that macroeconomics, firstly, has been done terribly and, secondly, in terms of academic macroeconomics, these guys are absolutely useless, most of them." fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

"Verga is simply one of the great narrators of all time and his novellas are probably among the best pieces of fiction written in Italy, ever." fivebooks.com/best-books/i...

"Czechoslovakia dissolved by mutual consent – the two parties decided to have a velvet divorce." fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

"Bohemia is itself borderless, there are no direct limits to it. Its borders are constantly being redrawn. Pockets of bohemia have existed in various different cities in Europe and they’ve migrated to different locations within those cities over time." fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

"It is from the Greek—eu, meaning ‘well’ or ‘good’, and the suffix –genēs, as in genes, genetics— so it basically means ‘well born'" fivebooks.com/best-books/e...

"One of the ironies a century on from the revolution of 1911 is that in some ways China is a completely different country...and yet many of the problems..revolutionaries...were trying to solve are still very relevant" fivebooks.com/best-books/c...

“The genius of representative democracy is that it separates how we as citizens feel about the system of government from how we feel about the government of the day” fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

NEW Did you make a New Year's resolution to learn a new language? Feeling curious about Japan? Experienced language teacher Kazuki Morimoto recommends the best books to learn Japanese fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

"If you’re in a dispute and someone tells you “singular ‘they'” is a modern, politically correct abomination, look it up. You’ll find citations going back to 1375 from one great author after another, and the point is yours." fivebooks.com/best-books/g...

"The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge. It displaces ignorance without destroying wonder." fivebooks.com/best-books/p...

"Each translator would use the vernacular and slang of their own day. So a 19th-century translation, say, would sound a bit like Dickens." fivebooks.com/best-books/h...

"The Marquis de Sade was an aristocrat from a Provençal family, born in 1740. Born to a very old—and he was very proud of this—noble family." fivebooks.com/best-books/m...

"Travellers to Chile will agree that it is almost impossible to get a Chilean to tell you what they’re really thinking." fivebooks.com/best-books/c...

"A lot of people find it very difficult to write about climate change because it is not something that lends itself to comic effect, and it is not something that people often want to write about" fivebooks.com/best-books/j...

Those who love historical fiction have plenty of choice among the list of past Booker Prize-winning novels. We put together an overview of the Booker's past victors that will sweep you from Tudor England to 20th-century India by way of the 19th-century Outback. fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

NEW: "On the one hand, he was a successful military leader; on the other hand, he was a friend of many French philosophes, most notably Voltaire." Adam Storring of @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social tells us all about Frederick the Great of Prussia: fivebooks.com/best-books/f...

NEW: "Most experts would agree that we don’t know everything there is to know about gravity" James Riordon, author of Crush (@mitpress) recommends books to read on gravity: fivebooks.com/best-books/g...

"Coming to Britain from Germany as I did, you suddenly realise that this is a nation obsessed by gardens. Everyone thinks that digging flowerbeds is great entertainment and for a foreigner it seems quite a bizarre pastime." fivebooks.com/best-books/a...

"He gives us a list of qualities that are supposed to elicit the sublime. So: obscurity, darkness, towering heights, irregularity, being hidden and unknown, and so forth." fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

“ Samuel Johnson said in 1777 that if there were a referendum in England, people would vote for the restoration of the Stuarts.” fivebooks.com/best-books/m...

"Thutmose III was a great warrior pharaoh who forged the Egyptian empire all the way south into modern Sudan and all the way north up into Syria. There is the most beautiful statue of him, perfectly preserved, in the Luxor Museum" fivebooks.com/best-books/a...