The Health Warning: let us say it straight out: 10 is arbitrary, inadequate, ludicrous.For Heaven’s sake, it amounts to less than one book per genre and less than a hundredth of a book per field of inquiry. But still, 10 is a nice round number and while the successful candidates listed below have been picked out almost at random from a 500-long shortlist of worthy entrants, they are near to the top today. (Tomorrow I would have another list.) This list is flawed in another respect: honesty prevents me from recommending books I haven’t read (e.g. The Divine Comedy in Italian). And then there are the 10,000,000 masterpieces I haven’t heard of. This Top 10 is thus drawn from one person’s highly eclectic experience of Western literature; pulled down from the cortical library of an unsystematic bibliophile.

If this hasn’t put you off, read on and quarrel with this random selection of peaks and never again be tempted to waste your time with the over-rated mediocrities who dominate our current literary scene. (Names withheld for the sake of their families.)

The List

1. On Nature by Parmenides He is our cognitive godfather and in the 150 lines of his prosaic poem there occurs the first head-on collision of human knowledge with itself. Plato and Aristotle are his footnotes. You will read his complete works in 15 minutes and require an entire lifetime to feel into the implications of his unthinkable thoughts.

2. The Oxford Book of English Verse To choose an anthology is not to cheat. This is a gateway to an entire landscape of verse. Is it insular to choose English verse? No, for as Tagore said, to read poetry in translation is like looking at a tapestry from the back.

3. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare So obvious that it is forbidden to castaways on Desert Island Discs. Shakespeare is here because, though he is universally loved, admired, worshipped - except by academics who are paid to be superior to the literature they write about - he is still the greatest. Goethe pitied English writers who had to live in his great shade. As Alexandre Dumas said, ‘after God, Shakespeare has created most’. And God doesn’t exist.

4. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes Another collision of human consciousness with itself that has had a huge resonance in Western thought over the last 300 years. Lovely, lucid prose as well. Vertigo, astonishment, joy and panic await those who accept his invitation to question everything.

5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy I am sorry for another obvious choice but this is the greatest novel of all time. It gathers up more of human life than any other work of fiction and holds it altogether. Read it and be enlarged. 

6. Middlemarch by George Eliot Virginia Woolf described this as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. You don’t have to make any allowances for this panoramic fiction, in which you will find dozens of mirrors in which to come upon, rejoice in, and judge your own life from without. 

7. Ulysses by James Joyce There is no more faithful and inventive representation of the complexity, the connectedness and disconnectedness, of everyday life and consciousness. Ordinary daylight becomes the fabric of a vision.

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf A lesser work than Ulysses in some respects but a perfect evocation of the beauty and fragility of our death-haunted lives and of the flickering sensations and contradictory emotions that fill our hours.

9. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger This is the masterpiece of the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. In describing human being-in-the-world he transforms our sense of the world from that of a burdensome given to a miracle. The fact that he was such a wicked man casts an interesting light on the relationship between human consciousness at its height, the politics of the real world, and the ethics of everyday life. 

10. Pluto’s Republic by Peter Medawar Since the rise of science is the key event of the last 500 years and science-based technology the most important cultural fact of the twenty-first century, the absence of scientific tomes in this list may seem perverse. The truth is that the landmark texts - for example Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (possibly the most influential book over the last 1,000 years within and beyond science) - are not read even by scientists: they are built upon and thus disappear under their momentous consequences. But no-one who wants to be considered cultured should be ignorant of the means by which scientists arrive at their miraculously robust general conclusions which have informed the technology that supports, defines and transforms, our every waking moment. Peter Medawar’s account is perfect: he was one of the great essayists of the twentieth century.