In this beautifully illustrated volume, fifteen distinguished writers on architecture mark the retirement of Professor David Watkin from the University of Cambridge. Linked by the common theme of classicism, the chapters are divided into three sections. The first is concerned with architectural ideas and includes essays on Renaissance interpretations of Vitruvius, Roman Catholic Chapels in post-Reformation London, and architectural writers John Summerson and Hope Bagenal. The central section deals with aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Neo-classicism and includes new work on Marie-Joseph Peyre, Charles Barry and C.R. Cockerell. The final section is devoted to studies of classicism and the Picturesque in the twentieth century.

John Hoyte was a student at Cambridge University who realized one day that a grant he might get could provide an interesting and unusual summer vacation. And thus was born the idea of leading an elephant over the Alps via the trails, paths, and mountain passes taken by Hannibal with his army and war elephants in 218 B.C to do battle with the Roman empire. Hoyte’s successful mission, with an elephant named Jumbo on loan from the Turin zoo, became a media sensation, leading to international coverage and starting him on the way to a fifty-year career as an inventor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Hoyte’s story is a fascinating one, beginning with the six years of his childhood spent in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II. Throughout the years that followed, he has taken each surprising twist and turn of fate and used it to help build a life infused with purpose, creativity and fulfillment.

As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies.

While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

An original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative.

Why hasn't the poverty rate fallen in four decades, despite society's massive and varied efforts? The notable philosopher Charles Karelis contends that conventional explanations of poverty rest on a mistake. And so do the antipoverty policies they generate. This book proposes a new explanation of the behaviors that keep people poor, including nonwork, quitting school, nonsaving, and breaking the law. Provocative and thoughtful, it finds a hidden rationality in the problematic conduct of many poor people, a rationality long missed by economists. Using science, history, fables, philosophical analysis, and common observation, the author engages us and takes us to a deeper grasp of the link between consumption and satisfaction, and from there to a new view of distributive justice and to fresh policy recommendations for combating poverty. With this bold work and original insights, the long-stalled campaign against poverty can begin to move forward once more.