My late grandfather was once told, aboard a Merchant Navy ship in WWII, that if a man had read Paradise Lost, he could call himself educated. He duly read Paradise Lost, and that was him pretty much done with books.

At MR PORTER, we are a little more ambitious. With the help of four experts from the publishing industry, we have drawn up a list of 50 classics that give pleasure and wisdom, and which every educated chap should have read.

Our thanks therefore to Virago founder Ms Carmen Callil, the veteran publisher Mr Christopher MacLehose of the MacLehose Press, the agent Mr Peter Straus, who heads the agency Rogers, Coleridge & White, and an actual Mr Porter, Mr Max Porter, publisher at Granta and author of the prize-winning Grief Is The Thing With Feathers.

How many have you read? And, yes, Paradise Lost is in there.

by Mr Charles Dickens

There’s so much Mr Charles Dickens to choose from, but here’s one that’s a manageable length and tells a humdinger of a story. Shudder at the sinister Magwitch, tremble at the sepulchral Miss Havisham, blub at the fate of good Joe Gargery.

by Mr Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Not always your man for laughs, Mr Fyodor Dostoevsky, but Crime And Punishment is a towering Russian classic, both thrilling and profound. It will put you off killing grannies for good.

by Mr Thomas Mann

The summit of The Magic Mountain dwarfs anything else in modern German literature. The whole history of pre-WWI Europe mixes in the clear air of a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The one good thing to come out of Davos.

by Mr Daniel Defoe

The story of a hardworking Protestant on a desert island. All English novelists (and cartoonists) owe Mr Daniel Defoe a debt of gratitude.

by Ms Christina Stead

Long before An American Werewolf In London, here was an Aussie writer in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. The antipodean Ms Christina Stead spent time in Geordieland in 1949, and this novel of post-war working-class life is the result.

by Mr Rohinton Mistry

A vast tapestry of life in India between 1947 and The Emergency three decades later. It follows the lives of several protagonists from the so-called untouchables to children of privilege.

by Mr Primo Levi

Mr Primo Levi, an Italian industrial chemist, spent 11 months in Auschwitz. This collection of linked short stories associates events in his own life with 21 of the chemical elements. Alchemical genius.

Ms Charlotte Brontë

Ms Charlotte Brontë was both a great storyteller and an acute anatomist of the human heart. Damaged, secretive, tragic Mr Rochester is a romantic icon for the ages.

by Ms Jane Austen

 Ms Jane Austen was as bright and beady a comedian of manners as ever put pen to paper. Chaps, take note. Don’t be like Mr Willoughby.

by Mr Thomas Pynchon

A dizzying classic of paranoia about American soldiers stationed in Europe during WWII. V-2 rockets, crazy conspiracies and the best banana-related meal in fiction.

by Mr Alain-Fournier

Mr Alain-Fournier’s only novel is a magical and tragic fable of youth, lost and rediscovered love, and the passing of time. It helped inspire The Great Gatsby.

by Ms Harper Lee

Racism in the 1930s American South. Part social history, part morality tale, part evocation of its narrator Scout’s coming of age. A captivating tale, simply told.

by Homer

The tale of Odysseus’ schlep home from the Trojan wars is one of the wellsprings of Western literature, from Ulysses to (possibly) Planes, Trains And Automobiles. Inexhaustible.

by Mr Shusaku Endo

This historical novel about a Portuguese missionary in 17th-century Japan was described by Mr John Updike as “sombre, delicate and startlingly empathetic”.

by Mr Art Spiegelman

For those who think comics are just for kids, here’s a rebuke. Mr Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel describes with great subtlety and poignancy his family’s experience in the Holocaust, with Nazis as cats and Jews as mice.

by Mr Isaac Babel

Mr Isaac Babel’s stories of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920 are classics of war writing.

Mr Herman Melville

The story of Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale contains multitudes. Adventure story here, religious allegory there, Wikipedia-style discussion of scrimshaw in another place.

by Mr Chinua Achebe

Mr Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece about colonial Nigeria is the fountainhead of African literature in English.

**by Count Leo Tolstoy  **

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” said Count Leo Tolstoy. Every well-read family has a copy of Anna Karenina, we might add.

by Ms Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A brief, harrowing account of one woman’s descent into psychosis as she’s confined to a badly decorated room.

by Ms Mary Shelley

Forget campy Mr Boris Karloff and his bolted neck; the original is exciting, poignant, complex and philosophical.

by Mr Miguel de Cervantes

Rumbustiously comic, poignant, big-hearted, metafictional, heroic and anti-heroic all at the same time. It showed the novel a world of new possibilities.

by Mr Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Sicilian noblemen during the Risorgimento. Fun fact: Italy doesn’t have any leopards, but The Serval Cat wouldn’t have had the same ring.

**by Mr Gustave Flaubert **

Mr Gustave Flaubert took moral complexity and psychological realism to new heights in this story of a bourgeois adulteress and her tragic – and grisly – end.

by Ms George Eliot

Maybe the best, and certainly the most grown-up, novel in English. The life of a whole town, the moral life of a whole species. Unforgettable stuff.

by Mr Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

You don’t often read a book dedicated to a worm. Speaking from beyond the grave, Brás Cubas looks back on his life and finds it rather so-so.

by Mr Henry James

Before Mr Henry James’s sentences got too long, he produced this masterly and engrossing story of innocence and cynicism, romance and disappointment.

**by Mr James Joyce **

Modernist masterpiece. Read it once to get through it, twice to enjoy it, three times to appreciate it.

by Mr F Scott Fitzgerald

A small miracle of literary construction: wistful, romantic, symbolic, fabular. There’s not a word out of place.

by Mr George Orwell

Mr George Orwell’s novel has seldom seemed more relevant. Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! A despairing satiric X-ray of totalitarianism.

by Mr Mikhail Bulgakov

What if the devil turned up in Stalin’s atheist Soviet Union with a cat in tow? Stir in Pontius Pilate and a Soviet writers’ union and you end up with something quite extraordinary.

by Mr John Milton

The great English epic. Mr John Milton’s poetic music has never been rivalled. Paradise Lost also tells an amazing story, full of psychological subtlety and with marvellous set pieces. It really is an education.

by Mr Italo Calvino

The bizarre, hilarious, mind-mangling story of a book within a book within a book. Wonderfully funny, extremely clever and unlike anything else.

by Mr Kurt Vonnegut

Mr Kurt Vonnegut knows all about the firebombing of Dresden, because he was there. This novel, which adds in crazy aliens and good jokes, treats great suffering with deep wisdom and deceptive lightness.

by Mr Joseph Conrad

Mr Joseph Conrad’s book about terrorism and paranoia in smoggy 19th-century London is looking more prophetic year by year. A fascinating work.

by Mr Naguib Mahfouz

A roomy, humane family saga about three generations in Cairo living through the turbulence of the first half of the 20th century. Hugely absorbing.

by Mr Laurence Sterne

Everything “metafictional” writers have ever done, Mr Laurence Sterne did first. Funny, eccentric, clever and will change the way you think about noses.

by Sir PG Wodehouse

Nobody has a comic touch like the late Sir PG Wodehouse. If you haven’t read him, you deny yourself a vital pleasure. This is a great place to start. Bliss.

by Ms Leonora Carrington

A uniquely odd and witchy story, whose protagonist is a deaf and toothless old lady exiled to an old folks’ home in the opening pages. A surrealist romp.

by Mr Lewis Carroll

Weird potions, white rabbits, Cheshire cats and hookah-smoking caterpillars. Plus, lots of good jokes about maths. Curiouser and curiouser.

by Ms Jean Rhys

Spare a thought for Mr Rochester’s first wife, stuck up there in the attic being mad in Jane Eyre (above, 08). Ms Jean Rhys did and made a plot device, magnificently, into a breathing person.

Mr Aldous Huxley

Mr Aldous Huxley’s disconcerting technological dystopia anticipates so many of the fears of today, and influenced generations of science-fiction writers.

by Mr Don DeLillo

Mr Don DeLillo has seldom been as profound, and never as funny, as in this novel about a professor of Hitler studies, his eccentric family, an Airborne Toxic Event and the fear of death.

by Mr WG Sebald

Mr WG Sebald’s masterpiece turns a stroll through Suffolk into a tour of the 20th century. The book that launched a thousand psychogeographers.

by Mr Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Think life in a gulag wasn’t as bad as all that? Think again. Mr Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s slim, grim book told the world how it really was.

Mr José Saramago

This brilliant book helped the Portuguese writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone’s gone blind. What to do? Like Day Of The Triffids without the plants.

by Mr Jaan Kross

Estonia’s break-out literary classic is a historical novel about a nobleman who marries a peasant girl and then speaks his mind to the Czar. Is he, as everyone thinks, off his rocker?

Mr Georges Perec

Mr Georges Perec once wrote a novel entirely without using the letter E. Here, he focuses on the fictional island of W. A book that threads memoir and fiction and blurs the lines between them.

by Mr James Hogg

A transfixing study of evil with Calvinist theology chucked in. Like American Psycho, but with divine grace instead of Huey Lewis And The News.

by Mr Richard Ford

This is a great early novel by an already great writer. It paved the way for his Frank Bascombe trilogy and established Mr Richard Ford as a modern American great.