At The School of Life we believe literature has the power to transform lives and that quality will always matter more than quantity. Each title in our Box Set collection contains our pick of essential classic and modern texts on a given theme. They're our favorite lifetime companions and guides.

This set is about Truth. It gathers the ideas of four very different thinkers, each with a unique and clear-eyed vision of the world.

The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly - A highly personal journal written by Cyril Connolly during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him.

Straw Dogs by John Gray - This is a radical work of philosophy that sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world.

Collected Maxims by La Rochefoucauld - Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behavior have influenced writers, thinkers, and public figures as various as Voltaire, Proust, de Gaulle, Nietzsche, and Conan Doyle.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - These meditations offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired throughout the centuries.