Fifteen minutes,
one classic at a time

A book that refuses to hand you the answer. Two thousand years of thinking by question.

• 01 The Man Who Froze on the Roof
• 06 It Is Not in Heaven
• 11 Kamtza and Bar Kamtza

The most read questions and answers of the last 2,500 years. To the same question the teacher gave a different answer each time.

• 01 To Learn and Keep Practising
• 03 From Fifteen to Seventy
• 07 If You Hear the Way in the Morning

Why a 2,500-year-old book on war works better at a negotiating table.

• 01 War Is Not a Light Thing
• 06 Winning Without Fighting
• 15 Be Formless Like Water

Not how people ought to live, but how they actually do. For 500 years, the most dangerous book on the shelf.

• 01 Two Kinds of State
• 05 A Seat Won by His Own Strength
• 09 A Prince Made by the People

They look like stories about gods. Every one of them is about people.

• 01 The First Gods
• 09 The Daughter Taken Underground
• 12 Everything He Touched Turned to Gold

The war was over. Getting home took another ten years.

• 01 The Seat Empty Twenty Years
• 10 My Name Is Nobody
• 15 Tie Me to the Mast

A monkey born from stone turns heaven upside down. Then he walks west for fourteen years, and not by himself.

• 01 The Monkey Born from Stone
• 06 He Turned Heaven Upside Down
• 12 Freed and Fitted the Same Day

A woman who stayed alive by never finishing the story. A thousand nights and one.

• 01 The Night That Never Ends
• 07 Two Men With the Same Name
• 15 The Night of Not Asking

A man who staked a whole ship on chasing one whale. The longest hunt at sea.

• 01 Call Me Ishmael
• 05 A Bosom Friend
• 13 The Legend of the White Whale

Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and then a play about forgiveness. Four hundred years on, the questions are still open.

• 01 Four Who Ran to the Wood
• 04 What Taming Means
• 09 A Pound of Flesh

Everyone reads everyone else. And almost everyone gets it wrong. Two hundred years of the most widely read misunderstandings.

• 01 A Single Man of Good Fortune
• 04 He Was Watching
• 10 The One Who Believed the Officer

Seeing and observing are not the same. In one room, only one man does the second.

• 01 You Have Been in Afghanistan
• 07 A Whistle in the Night
• 10 Five Seeds in an Envelope

Everyone knows the names and no one knows where they came from. One monk chose what the official record had dropped.

• 01 The One Who Came Out of the Cave
• 09 The Sun and the Moon Go Dark
• 14 The Man Who Danced and Withdrew

Harder than beating the enemy was surviving the doubt of his own side.

• 01 Before the First Battle
• 03 The Turtle Ship Sails
• 10 Working the Military Farms