Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan, writer for The New Republic, The New York Times, and www.andrewsullivan.com, selects seven timeless literary favorites.

Montaigne’s Essays translated by Donald Frame (Bedford/St. Martin’s, $26.30). Still the best essays ever written: funny, smart, timeless, learned. The prose is earthy and deep.

My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley (New York Review of Books, $10.36). The ultimate dog book-by a British literary editor in the mid-20th century. One of the few books that brought tears of laughter to my eyes.

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Collected Poems by Philip Larkin (Noonday Press, $13.60). In my book, the best poet of the last century. Some of these verses are almost painfully beautiful. He writes about sadness better than anyone I know.

On Human Conduct by Michael Oakeshott (Clarendon Press, $39.95, out of print). Not for the beach, but the most underrated work of political theory in a century-written in elegant, elegiac prose. No stronger defense of modern liberalism has been written.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (Signet Classic, $6.25). No apologies for this one. No one can understand the contemporary American left or p.c. authoritarianism without reading this book.

Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson (Courage Books, $8.98). If I had to take one book anywhere, this would be it. So intelligent, so beautiful, so pithy, so American. It never fails to restore the soul.

Winston Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941 by Martin Gilbert (out of print). Instead of explaining Churchill’s genius and courage, Gilbert simply walks us through it, minute by minute. Heroes still count for something. Churchill is still mine.