Milton's Paradise Lost. Goethe's Faust. Aaron Spelling's Satan's School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark wit and encyclopedic knowledge to go mano a mano with the Prince of Darkness himself.

Wisdom, humor, and dark observations by the founder of the Church of Satan. LaVey ponders such topics as nonconformity, occult faddism, erotic politics, the "Goodguy badge," demoralization and the construction of artificial human companions.

"Appalachian folk magic and conjure are little known today, but forty or fifty years ago, just about every person you might ask in Appalachia either knew something about it themselves or knew someone who did it. These practices and 'superstitions' are at the core Appalachian culture. Who were the old conjurors and witches of Appalachia? What did they do, believe in, and dress land talk like? How can you learn the ways of conjuring for yourself? This book answers those questions and more"--

How do creative people think? Do great works of the imagination originate in words or in images? Is there a rational explanation for the sudden appearance of geniuses like Mozart or Einstein? Such questions have fascinated people for centuries; only in recent years, however, has cognitive psychology been able to provide some clues to the mysterious process of creativity. In this revised edition of Notebooks of the Mind, Vera John-Steiner combines imaginative insight with scientific precision to produce a startling account of the human mind working at its highest potential. To approach her subject John-Steiner goes directly to the source, assembling the thoughts of "experienced thinkers"--artists, philosophers, writers, and scientists able to reflect on their own imaginative patterns. More than fifty interviews (with figures ranging from Jessica Mitford to Aaron Copland), along with excerpts from the diaries, letters, and autobiographies of such gifted giants as Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Diego Rivera, among others, provide illuminating insights into creative activity. We read, for example, of Darwin's preoccupation with the image of nature as a branched tree while working on his concept of evolution. Mozart testifies to the vital influence on his mature art of the wondrous "bag of memories" he retained from childhood. Anais Nin describes her sense of words as oppressive, explaining how imagistic free association freed her as a writer. Adding these personal accounts to laboratory studies of thought process, John-Steiner takes a refreshingly holistic approach to the question of creativity. What emerges is an intriguing demonstration of how specific sociocultural circumstances interact with certain personality traits to encourage the creative mind. Among the topics examined here are the importance of childhood mentor figures; the lengthy apprenticeship of the talented person; and the development of self- expression through highly individualistic languages, whether in images, movement or inner speech. Now, with a new introduction, this award-winning book provides an uniquely broad-based study of the origins, development and fruits of human inspiration.

"When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union ... Prime Minister Winston Churchill reached out to promise support to the Kremlin and collaborate with Britain's former archenemy. Fighting the Nazi menace together became the new priority, leading to unprecedented levels of cooperation between the two governments. In order to defeat the Nazis, Britain and the USSR shared intelligence and revealed operative secrets to each other, including those of the secretive security services. They helped with the dispatch of agents and even ran agents together, attempting to foil German counter-intelligence strategies. For much of the Cold War, crucial facts of this collaboration remained top secret. Based on recently declassified files, [this book] explores this little-known chapter of the Second World War ... [using] personnel files and other historical sources to reveal for the first time the activities of officers and agents on this 'invisible front, ' recounting the actions of many brave men and women who risked their lives to defeat the Nazis"--Page 4 of cover.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) published an extraordinary number of works during his lifetime, but he left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Volume 3 of this 11-volume edition of Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks includes Kierkegaard's extensive notes on lectures by the Danish theologian H. N. Clausen and by the German philosopher Schelling, as well as a great many other entries on philosophical, theological, and literary topics. In addition, the volume includes many personal reflections by Kierkegaard, notably those in which he provides an account of his love affair with Regine Olsen, his onetime fiancée.

I would like to write a novel in which the main character would be a man who got a pair of glasses, one lens of which reduced images as powerfully as an oxyhydrogen microscope, and the other of which magnified on the same scale, so that he perceived everything relatively. ? A flight of fancy by an aspiring science fiction writer? While it may sound as such, this wistful musing is one of the little-discussed personal reflections of nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose remarkable journals and notebooks, unpublished during his lifetime, are presented here. The first of an eleven-volume series produced by Copenhagen's Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, this volume is the first English translation and commentary of Kierkegaard's journals based on up-to-date scholarship. It offers new insight into Kierkegaard's inner life. In addition to early drafts of his published works, the journals contain his thoughts on current events and philosophical and theological matters, notes on books he was reading, miscellaneous jottings, and ideas for future literary projects. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the marginal comments he added later. The new edition of the journals reproduces this format and contains photographs of original manuscript pages, as well as extensive scholarly commentary. Translated by leading experts on Kierkegaard, Journals and Notebooks will become the benchmark for all future Kierkegaard scholarship.