AN ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARA gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth centuryThe year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of Europe's wealthiest families, signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his...

'The question Eilenberger sets out to answer in this ambitious, enthralling book: what use is philosophy in the middle of a war?' The Sunday TimesThe year is 1933. Hannah Arendt escapes Berlin, seeking refuge among the stateless gathering in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir reimagines the dance between consciousness and the world outside in a Rouen café. Ayn Rand labours in Hollywood exile on the novel she believes destined to reignite the flame of liberty in her...

Brought to you by Penguin.The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The ...

The year is 1949. Theodor Adorno returns from New York to bombed-out Frankfurt, tasked with finding enlightenment from within ruin. Susan Sontag is reborn in San Francisco. Michel Foucault attempts suicide, again, in Paris. Paul Feyerabend, crippled by a war wound, recircles his native Vienna. The war's aftermath calls for the world to be remade, and over the coming decades this quartet of thinkers will revolutionise how we think about society, culture and science.The Haunted P...

Brought to you by Penguin.This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encountersFrom the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy ...

"We are sleepwalking into catastrophe; Riemen wants to wake us up and he does with passion, wisdom, and eloquence." —Simon SchamaAn international bestseller, To Fight Against This Age consists of two beautifully written, cogent, and urgent essays about the rise of fascism and the ways in which we can combat it.In “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” Rob Riemen explores the theoretical weakness of fascism, which depends on a politics of resentment, the ...

Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics.Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis.Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a d...

Released to the public for the first time in in 1887, Esperanto had its specific origins in the fertile brain of a single individual, Zamenhof, and in the particular circum stan ces into which he was born and came of age. It is the story of these origins that Aleksander Korzhenkov's biography sets out to tell. -- That biography was originally published in Esperanto; the present version, in Ian Richmond's excellent translation, is an abridged version of the original text, prepared for Engli...

"[A] superb study of Russian cultural memory makes all too clear, ghosts of the unburied dead affect literature, art, public life and mental health too." — The EconomistAfter Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and...

For most English-speaking readers, Russian literature consists of a small number of individual writers - nineteenth-century masters such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev - or a few well-known works - Chekhov's plays, Brodsky's poems, and perhaps Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago from the twentieth century. The medieval period, as well as the brilliant tradition of Russian lyric poetry from the eighteenth century to the present, are almost completely terra inc...

An examination of the association between the influential and controversial philosopher's ideas and fascistic beliefs.Frequently described as the "radical aristocrat" of the spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate an Übermensch endowed with exceptional mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with the fascistic manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that crushed the autonomy of the individual? The questio...

A critical history of 20th century political movement by the Hannah Arendt Prize-winning author of Interpreting the French Revolution.Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, François Furet was hailed as "one of the most influential men in contemporary France" by the New York Review of Books. In Lies, Passions, and Illusions, Furet's presents a cohesive, late-career meditation on the political passions of ...