A literary master's entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be f...

In this eye-opening, intellectually stimulating appreciation of a fascinating school of philosophy, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful argument that materialism is at the center of today's important scientific and cultural as well as philosophical debat...

To secure power in a crisis, leaders must sell deep change as a means to future good. But how could we know the future? Nomi Claire Lazar draws on stories across a range of cultures and contexts, ancient and modern, to show how leaders use constructi...

This book is a translation of a key commentary on the "Book of Changes, or Yijing (I Ching)", perhaps the most broadly influential text of classical China. The "Yijing" first appeared as a divination text in Zhou-dynasty China (ca. 1045–256 bce) and...

Game theory assumes that people are self-interested and works from this premise to explain competitive behavior. People don't just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for coope...

An authority on the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. Organized around several key moments – such as his sudden...

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century – fascism, communism, and liberalism – only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural e...

Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we laugh? What are we to make of the sheer variety of laughter, from braying and cackling to sniggering and chortling? Is hum...

The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism's end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmi...

A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was a major influence on thinkers ranging from Kant and Schopenhauer to Einstein and Popper, and his writings continue to be deeply relevant today. With four essays by leading Hume scholars explo...