Jonathan Swift · 1726 · global

Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire, published as the travels of a ship's surgeon and furnished throughout with latitudes, bearings and dates so that it reads like a genuine voyage account. Four times Gulliver is wrecked, marooned or set adrift, and four times he comes back liking humanity rather less than he did before.

1. 1
   Bristol

   Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon of no particular distinction, sails from Bristol - and Swift gives every departure a date, a tonnage and a master's name, so that the impossible parts arrive inside an entirely ordinary logbook.

2. 2
   Lilliput

   Wrecked and washed ashore, he wakes staked to a beach by people six inches high whose politics turn on which end of an egg to break - and finds that a nation's quarrels look no less serious for being conducted at that scale.

3. 3
   Brobdingnag

   Left behind on a far northern coast, he is kept as a curiosity by giants and made to explain England to their king - who listens carefully to an account of parliaments, wars and gunpowder and concludes that Europeans are vermin.

4. 4
   Laputa

   Taken aboard a flying island of theoreticians who cannot build a house with square corners, he tours academies extracting sunbeams from cucumbers - Swift's revenge on the improving projectors of his own century.

5. 5
   The Houyhnhnms

   Set adrift by mutineers, he lands among rational horses who keep a filthy human-shaped animal as livestock - and returns home so convinced by them that he cannot bear the smell of his own family and prefers to talk to the stable.