If you had to name 12 books that changed the world, which would you pick?

Broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg has written his own book on the topic, and his list will become a TV series. It includes the Football Association Rule Book and advice about conjugal bliss from Marie Stopes, but not a single novel, although Bragg is himself a prolific producer of fiction.

He has also confined his choices to the British Isles, and his selection includes a good number of scientists, as well as people who are known primarily as politicians and campaigners rather than writers.

The list includes (clockwise, from top left) King James I, who agreed that a new bible should be commissioned, which was written by six teams of devout scholars; William Shakespeare, whose influence on the English language was mapped out in a previous Bragg book; the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce.

There is also Isaac Newton, the solitary genius who worked feverishly for 20 hours a day during the two years in which he was in flight from the plague, and whose story, explored in another Bragg TV series, seeded the idea of exploring the publication of books that became turning points in history.

They are books which very few people have actually read, as in the case of, for example, Michael Faraday's researches in electricity - but they have fundamentally altered our world, says Bragg.

Twelve Books that Changed the World is published by Hodder at £20 and begins on ITV1 next Sunday at 11.15pm.