On the Guardian’s list of 100 greatest non-fiction books, I chose from a variety of categories: art, culture environment, biography, culture, history, literature, mathematics, memoir, mind, politics, religion, science, society, music, philosophy, and travel.

Some of my favorites are:

Art: The Story of Art (1950) by Ernst Gombrich

Biography: Goodbye to All That (1929) by Robert Graves

Culture: Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said

Literature: The Lives of the Poets (1777) by Samuel Johnson, An Image of Africa(1975) by Chinua Achebe, The Uses of Enchantment (1976) by Bruno Bettelheim

Memoir: De Profundis (1897) by Oscar Wilde

Science: A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking