Age of Extremes, by Eric Hobsbawm.

Off the top of my head:

Cover to cover...

In the Vineyard of the Text — Ivan Illich
Structures of Everyday Life — Fernand Braudel
Design for the Real World — Victor Papanek
The Uses of Enchantment — Bruno Bettelheim
On Photography — Susan Sontag
Empire of Signs — Roland Barthes
London the Biography — Peter Ackroyd

Frequent reference...

Religions in Four Dimensions — Walter Kaufmann
The New Golden Bough — Sir James George Frazier
A History of Western Philosophy — Bertrand Russell
Modern French Painters — R.H. Wilenski
Elements of Typographic Style — Robert Bringhurst

Biographies...

A Life of Picasso — John Richardson
Mark Rothko — James Breslin
Zola — Frederick Brown

"Structures" is another great Braudel work. He is one of my genuine heroes. Another French "history" with much more than specialist appeal is Ladurie's Montaillou.

Bruno, my edition of Tocqueville is at least 30 years old, but I would think that any version you could get would be worth it.

I'll go with something a bit lighter and nominate Spike Milligan's series of war memoirs. Funny, touching and full of the kind of insanity that they used to shoot people for (and, indeed, tried to get him charged with).

Essays:
Joan Didion, The White Album
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Criticism:
Susan Sontag, On Photography
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual

History:
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis
Richard Wright, The Middle Ground
Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul
George Chauncey, Gay New York
Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing

Other:
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
D.J. Waldie, Holy Land
Michael Lewis, Moneyball

Ten Rillington Place - Ludovic Kennedy
The Airman and the Carpenter - Ludovic Kennedy
Gulag, a History - Anne Applebaum
Forgotten Voices of the Great War - Max Arthur
Wartime - Britain 1939-1945 - Juliet Gardiner
Our Hidden Lives - Simon Garfield
Austerity Britain 1945-51 - David Kynaston

I would describe all these as essential: well-written and researched, important, disturbing, extremely moving, but above all, highly readable. Few chuckles, mind you.

Funny, I've never considered this question before.

The Nude- Kenneth Clark
London- Stephen Inwood
Seven Lamps Of Architecture- John Ruskin
Riots, Risings And Revolution- Ian Gilmour

Vote Labour, read with the Tories.

Eh. I suppose this means not stuff you read for academic purposes? I would have to say If this is A Man/The Truce wins. I want to also say Fat is a Feminist Issue but I shouldn't, really.

Lyra, most of the histories I mentioned were all for academic reading.

Alone No Longer
Stanley Stein

QUOTE:
Yohei Sasakawa: Stanley Stein was a leprosy patient and resident of Carville, Louisiana, the only leprosy sanatorium on the US mainland, between 1931 and 1967. A journalist, he began a newspaper at Carville called The Star. This had a big influence on leprosy patients around the world. Subsequently, he published a book about his experiences called Alone No Longer. This is not just a valuable record of life in the sanatorium, but also an insightful reflection on the discriminatory and sub-human treatment of people affected by the disease. Stein’s words tell us just how deep-rooted the stigma and discrimination against people affected by leprosy in the US was, and the degree to which their human rights were infringed upon, and demonstrates the importance of this issue in the context of social justice.

(paragraph from here)

I forgot one:

Lawrence Weschler, Boggs. It's about the artist JSG Boggs, who can do incredibly believable copies of paper money. He takes his pieces--which are not direct copies of currency--and then tries to get stores and businesses to accept them in lieu of cash.

If This Is A Man/The Truce, of course.

My favourite piece of travel writing is Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean, although Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and The Road To Oxiania by Robert Byron come close.

Probably the most entertaining history I've read is John Julius Norwich's Byzantium trilogy (well, I've read more entertaining histories, but not with the same quality of writing, and less convincingly "non-fiction" given the quality of fact checking).

For food writing, there's a lot of choice, but I love Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything ; although for reference Harold McGee's Kitchen Science and Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food are both fantastic.

I quite like The River Cottage Meat Book, myself. Changed my life, actually.

Oh. Forgot to mention Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

I'm not a massive non-fiction readers but some I've enjoyed are:

Brazil by John Malathronas - part history, part travelogue, all fascinating.

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind by Diana and Michael Preston - a biography of William Dampier, the gentleman buccaneer. Dampier's own writing is well worth a look as well.

Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson, though of course it does help if you're obsessed with Borges before you read it.

Blake by Peter Ackroyd. I know not everyone on here is Ackroyd's biggest fan, but I do think this is a fantastic biography.

The Book of Salsa by C้sar Miguel Rond๓n. Again a rather specific one.

Oh and it might be a bit beneath OTF to bring a football book into the discussion here - a bit too obvious, perhaps - but I've got to give another mention to David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round at this juncture too. It's non-fiction, and it's an incredible book / structure / achievement. Need we say more?

I mostly can't be doing with biographies. Can somebody quietly drop the hint to my Mum?