Everything, in order of appearance.

Galileo Galilei

On a January night in 1610 a professor of mathematics in Padua pointed a homemade glass at Jupiter and saw three small stars beside it. Twenty-three years later he was on his knees before the Inquisition, and the charge was not the moons and not the sun. It was a book.

He was right about the earth. The proof he offered was wrong, and this book shows exactly how — from the trial file, the letters on both sides, and the ambassador’s dispatches home.

Galileo’s Inquisitor

The same trial from the other side of the table. Vincenzo Maculano, the Commissary General who prosecuted him, is handed a charge without a reason — and then reads the book he is meant to convict.

Every date, document, decision and outcome is the historical record’s. The conversations are invented.

Niccolò Machiavelli

He didn’t invent ruthless politics. He just took notes.

For fourteen years he stood beside the men who decided things and was never allowed to decide anything. This book sets the dispatches he wrote on the day beside the books he wrote years later, and watches the story change.

Adam Smith

A week into the job as a customs commissioner, he checked his own wardrobe against the list of prohibited goods and burned what failed it.

The invisible hand appears once in eleven hundred pages. Monopoly appears more than two hundred times. This is the life, the world being remade around him, and the argument he worked out by watching it happen.

Charles Darwin

He had the idea of the century. His plan for publishing it was to die first.

A detective story about evidence: pigeon clubs, barnacles, seeds rotted in brine, and twenty-one years of building a case for something nobody will ever watch happen.

Confucius

He took the word that meant a lord’s son and pointed it at men who owned nothing.

No portrait, nothing in his own hand, one certain date. What survives is a book of sayings put together by his students, and the record of a man who spent forty years failing to get the job he wanted.

Which Exit?

The forgotten boss behind Boardwalk Empire and Bridgegate: a true story of the New Jersey machine, and the governor who learned it from the inside and then took it apart.