This brilliant and eloquent book by a distinguished scholar and critic examines the history, the limits, and the promise of the human mind and the knowledge of which it is capable. Professor Highet explores the meaning of our culture from the intellectual and moral monuments of the Greeks, Romans, and Judeo-Christians, and our contemporary thinkers. Out of this book comes a clear definition of knowledge and insights into the strength and limitations of the mind.

A. E. Housman, romantic poet and classical scholar, is best-known as the author of A Shropshire Lad and the meticulous editor of Manilius, the Latin poet of astronomy. In this first full biography, Richard Perceval Graves convincingly reconciles the two apparently conflicting sides of Housman's personality, and reassesses the reputation of a man who was something of a mystery even to his closest friends. 'This is bound to become the standard life.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'Dispassionate and well-researched.' Philip Larkin, Guardian

The Caribbean, Saint-Domingue, 1791. From the grip of French colonialism rises the biggest slave revolution the world has ever known, led by one of the most gifted leaders of all times. The Hour and The Man gives life to this man and this event, delivering a powerful portrayal of black heroism and colonial politics in the Caribbean. Written by 19th century British activist and author Harriet Martineau, this book greatly stirred public opinion after it was first published in 1841 and subsequently fueled the debate on the abolition of slavery. The Hour and The Man still stands as a widely acclaimed read, relying on both historical research and author's imagination. This reprint edition comes with a Reading Guide that includes a geographical map of the revolution, a time-line of events and questions for discussion.

How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself ? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.