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

Someone else won the empire in the end. The ones remembered are the ones who kept faith.

• 01 The Oath in the Peach Garden
• 04 An Oath Over a Hidden Seal
• 10 The Only Heroes Are You and I

A giant among the small, a toy among the giants. How big you are depends on where you stand.

• 01 Bound by Every Hair
• 04 Which End of the Egg
• 11 The Verdict of Three Scholars

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

The man who kept the law to the end breaks. The man who broke it saves a life.

• 01 The House With No Lock
• 03 The Two Silver Candlesticks
• 10 The Bucket in the Dark Wood

From the moment its maker turned away, the thing he made had to learn alone.

• 01 A Letter About Having No Friend
• 05 The Night a Yellow Eye Opened
• 08 Two Who Met on the Glacier

He saw what no one else could see, all the way to the end. The world laughed at first, and later began to act out his belief for him.

• 01 The Village I Choose Not to Remember
• 05 Thirty-Odd Giants
• 11 The Knight in the Barber's Basin

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