What is the philosophy of sweat? Reality TV? Domestic warfare? Making up and having sex? Take a sparkling ride through an ordinary day with hilarious philosophical gadfly Robert Rowland Smith in Breakfast with Socrates.Ever want to have a bagel with Hegel? Eggs with Bacon? Or spend a day with Socrates, Mill, Herodotus, or Kant, able to pick their brains about the most mundane moments of your life? Former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith though...

Learn to ride a bicycle with Einstein, have your first kiss with Kant, get your first job with Adam Smith, and weather midlife with Dante. Let history’s greatest minds illuminate life’s turning points.In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down to earth by proving, in a very engaging and entertaining way, that human moments meet big ideas on a regular basis. Now Smith offers the natural offspring of that book, expa...

All too often, the history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is told as a tale of two sides. While 'Lit crit' pored over the author's every line, 'Theory' stood on the shoulder of texts to gaze into the metaphysical mists.Drawing on the key insights of both Lit crit and Theory, On Modern Poetry tries to get beyond the opposition between them, proposing instead a 'total criticism' that draws on all resources available. It combines 'analytic irony' with 'imaginative em...

How is it that the most carefully-laid business strategies can go horribly wrong when put into practice? Robert Rowland Smith's answer, based on years of experience in high-level consultancy, is that 'reality eats strategy for breakfast': strategy, based on projections and assuming business is a rational pursuit, can't deal with the messy reality of life.More helpful are these practical questions that can help you plan what to do when your business comes into contact with reality. ...

Thousands of years before the pyramids were built in Egypt and the Trojan War was fought, a great civilization arose on the Anatolian plains. The Goddess and the Bull details the dramatic quest by archaeologists to unearth the buried secrets of human cultural evolution at this huge, spectacularly well-preserved 9,500-year-old village in Turkey.Here lie the origins of modern society -- the dawn of art, architecture, religion, family -- even the first tangible evidence of hu...

From the bestselling author of A History of God and The Great Transformation comes a balanced, nuanced understanding of the role religion plays in human life and the trajectory of faith in modern times.Why has God become incredible? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?Moving from the Paleolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong detail...

**Winner of the Baifang Schell Book Prize • 2025 Orwell Prize FinalistOne of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Nonfiction Books of 2024“A sprawling, complex morality tale, sweeping us along.” —The Wall Street Journal“In telling this personal story about family memory, exile and return, the book also takes in the breadth of [China’s] evolution during the 20th century.” —The Washington Post“This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad se...

Churchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must first understand the strategist.In The Strategists, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2. For example, Churchill's experiences of fa...

Song of great sorrow. Even greater love.Lost between the timeless lines of Homer’s epic, the women of Troy finally stand to be counted. Their story is one you’ve never encountered, and it will change the fate of Troy forever.Andromache has proven herself a capable leader, but can she maintain that hard-won status now that she is the mother to the city’s long-awaited heir? With enemies closing in, Andromache must bring together a di...

Malm unearths the shared roots of colonial adventurism in Palestine and fossil fuelled warfare.Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this urgent pa...

“Vivid.” —The Guardian * “Engrossing.” —Booklist * “Suspenseful, meticulously observed, enlightening.” —Margot Lee Shetterly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden FiguresIn this account of America’s first women astronauts “Grush skillfully weaves a story that, at its heart, is about desire: not a nation’s desire to conquer space, but the longing of six women to reach heights that were forbidden to them” (The...

Religion, oil, and war bent to the House of Saud’s will to dominate Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle EastIn recent years the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, has promoted the oil-rich kingdom as an open, liberalizing nation that has invested in culture, tourism, and social innovation to become a beacon for the region. International political manoeuvring, sports sponsorship, and the Vision 2030 programme with its vast architectural planning declare...