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...

Harry Hill stars as the Governor in this BBC Radio 4 prison-based sitcom‘Properly funny’ Miranda Sawyer, The ObserverThe Egg is Britain's remotest and highest-security prison, floating on a giant prehistoric egg in the middle of the ocean. Running the place is Governor Harry who, along with his trusty assistants Anne and Peter, does his best to keep the inmates under control – while dreaming of a transfer to the cushy Spar...

Ten full-cast dramas featuring some of the best known names in British comedy.In these ten witty, dark and disturbing episodes some of Britain’s best comedians come together to perform simultaneously hilarious and unsettling stories that will have you gripped. Sticky situations on ski slopes, placating an unruly ghost, a boy stuck at the bottom of well and an unusual adventure weekend with romantic overtones - are just some of the scenarios from comedy writers Mark...

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-...

Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism and history, and her own experiences as an émigré.Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an extraordinary portrait of one of the twentieth century's ...

This searing memoir of the author's concentration camp experience "is the autobiography of an extraordinarily acute conscience" ( Newsweek)."Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world."At the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival—mental, moral, and physical—through the enormity of t...

“A skilled exploration” of why 6 notable 20th-century philosophers—from Martin Heidegger to Michel Foucault—succumbed to “a narcissistic embrace of totalitarian politics” (The Washington Post).European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it? Here,...

In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his crimes against humanity. What does Hitler tell us about the nature of evil? In often dramatic encounters, Rosenbaum confronts historians, scholars, filmmakers, and deniers as he skeptically analyzes the key strains of Hitler interpretation.A balanced and thoughtful overview of a subject both frightening and profound, this is an extraordinary quest, an expedit...

Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt’s writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentia...

In this brilliant, strikingly original book, historian John Lukacs delves to the core of Adolf Hitler's life and mind by examining him through the lenses of his surprisingly diverse biographers.Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a myt...

Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. When she was in her mid-twenties and still living in Germany, Arendt wrote about the history of German Jews as a people living in a land that was not their own. In 1933, at the age of twenty-six, she fled to France, where she helped to arrange for German and eastern European Jewish youth to quit Europe and become pioneers in Palestine.During her years ...

Nietzsche remains one of the most influential philosophers of our time and this book is the definite guide to his philosophy. Whether you're a philosophy student struggling with phrases like 'the superman' and 'the will to power', or whether you simply want to understand more about the life and work of this fascinating man, this easy-to-navigate guide will help you to demystify Nietzsche's influential ideas and discover his legacy to modern thought.NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, fi...