How can we ever change the world? Military leaders have certainly managed to change large parts of it; scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can spread a more benign influence across whole continents; the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers can sweep through generations like fire. But books?

Reading books is generally a solitary pastime: bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action qualities that seem to shake the world. The pen may boast of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though, which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can be imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their books burned, but over history, it is books and the ideas expressed within them that have transformed the world.

But which books can be said to have changed the world? There are few better ways of starting an argument than producing a list, and I have no doubt that not everyone will be happy about the books I included in my list. About some, like the Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, there can be little argument — but what about Euclid’s Elements, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft? The answer is that any list can only be subjective.

Andrew Taylor. Books that changed the world: the 50 most influential books in human history. Quercus Editions, 2014 (adapted).