Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-l...

The fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were truly an Age of Secrecy in Europe, when arcane knowledge was widely believed to be positive knowledge which extended into all areas of daily life. So asserts Daniel Jutte in this engrossing, vivid,...

Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or ...might there be other reasons that account for...

The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical...

This three-volume boxed set is the definitive work on Franz Schubert's vocal music with piano. A richly illustrated encyclopaedia, these substantial volumes contain more than seven hundred song commentaries with parallel text and translations (by Ric...

During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America's enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the Great Agnostic". The nation's most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separa...

From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has travelled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin's friends, foes, and colleagues, government of...

In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the world's great treasure houses for rare books, comes this sumptuously illustrated curators' choice of fifty of the Library's most pri...

This lively book tells a story never told before: the complete history of women readers and the controversies their reading has inspired since the beginning of the written word. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to...

This ambitious publication is the first book to thoroughly evaluate the photography that emerged during Germany's geopolitical division from the 1950s to the 1980s. With richly illustrated and exhaustively researched analyses of photographic projects...