Last refreshed at 0600GMT Friday The best five books on everything | 30 July 2010

Homo Ludens

Johan Huizinga
Image of Homo Ludens
It’s a book about the way that play precedes culture, and is a distinct and very complicated human phenomenon, which the author sees as giving rise to much that we think of as civilisation, as encoding a set of human values, ideas and ways of being in the world.