'Essential' CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN'Punchy' JULIAN BAGGINI'Gripping' TIM SPECTORWINNER OF THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS AWARDSSHORTLISTED FOR THE FORTNUM & MASON FOOD AND DRINK AWARDSFood is life but our food system is killing us.Our global food system lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful players who are prioritising profit at any cost – despite rising obesity, ill-he...

Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this 2007 Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its a...

English Translation and Classical Reception is the first genuine cross-disciplinary study bringing English literary history to bear on questions about the reception of classical literary texts, and vice versa. The text draws on the author’s exhaustive knowledge of the subject from the early Renaissance to the present.The first book-length study of English translation as a topic in classical receptionDraws on the author’s exhaustive knowledge of English lite...

While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A...

AIDS epidemics continue to threaten the livelihoods of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Three decades after the disease was first recognized, the annual death toll from AIDS exceeds that from wars, famine and floods combined. Yet despite millions of dollars of aid and research, there has previously been little detailed on-the-ground analysis of the multifaceted impacts on rural people.Filling that gap, this book brings together recent evidence of AIDS impacts on rural hous...

Shakespeare's Books contains nearly 200 entries covering the full range of literature Shakespeare was acquainted with, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. The dictionary covers works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research, as well as explaining current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources include surveys of the ...

'Essential' CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN'Punchy' JULIAN BAGGINI'Gripping' TIM SPECTORFood is life but our food system is killing us.Our global food system lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful players who are prioritising profit at any cost – despite rising obesity, ill-health and a worsening climate crisis – aided by governments who are letting them get away with it.Stuart Gillespie, a vetera...

Countries across Africa are rapidly transitioning from rural to urban societies. The UN projects that 60% of people living in Africa will be in urban areas by 2050, with the urban population on the continent tripling over the next 50 years. The challenge of building inclusive and sustainable cities in the context of rapid urbanization is arguably the critical development issue of the 21st Century and creating food secure cities is key to promoting health, prosperity, equity, and ecological...

How we live is shaped by how we eat. You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises. And most of us now rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which is now contending with unprecedented challe...

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned?Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often violent world that...

We have so much choice over what we eat today because rural communities all over the world have had their choices taken away. To understand how our supermarket shopping makes us complicit in a system that routinely denies freedom to the world's poorest, and how we ourselves are poisoned by these choices, we need to think about the way our food comes to us.Stuffed and Starved takes a long and wide view of food production, to show how we all suffer the cons...

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer is an extensively revised version of the first edition, which has become a classic in the field. This new volume responds to the success of the first edition and to recent debates in Chaucer Studies. Important material has been updated, and new contributions have been commissioned to take into account recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. New chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in his works to French and ...