Ultimate Étapes is the essential guide to cycling the very best routes in Europe. From the epic ascent of the Stelvio to the windswept coastline of the Netherlands’ North Sea, by way of the cobbles of Flanders and Italy’s Strade Bianche, Peter Cossins has created a guide to the stages that have defined modern cycling. Taken together, they create a tour of Europe that offers as broad a variety of terrain as any of the Grand Tours would provide, enabling riders inspired by the beauty, thrills and demands of these races to challenge themselves on exactly the same parcours. Ultimate Étapes is a book for cyclists of all abilities - from experienced club racers to enthusiastic amateurs who might just want to take on one great cycle. Each stage includes a detailed route description, (with map and profile) and suggestions on other riding within each region, including details of the most significant sportives in the area. Peter Cossins’ beautifully written text explains why each stage merits inclusion with superb descriptions of the majestic scenery, the heroic deeds of cycling's legendary riders or the sheer endeavour and exhilaration of completing a stage.

From its inception, the 1903 Tour de France was a colorful affair. Full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating, it was a race to be remembered. Cyclists of the time weren't enthusiastic about participating in this "heroic" race on roads more suited to hooves than wheels, with bikes weighing up to thirty-five pounds, on a single fixed gear, for three full weeks. Assembling enough riders for the race meant paying unemployed amateurs from the suburbs of Paris, including a butcher, a chimney sweep and a circus acrobat. From Maurice "The White Bulldog" Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman whose parents were said to have swapped him for a round of cheese in order to smuggle him into France as a fourteen-year-old, to Hippolyte Aucouturier, who looked like a villain from a Buster Keaton movie with his jersey of horizontal stripes and handlebar moustache, the cyclists were a remarkable bunch. Starting in the Parisian suburb of Montgeron, the route took the intrepid cyclists through Lyon, over the hills to Marseille, then on to Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes, ending with great fanfare at the Parc des Princes in Paris. There was no indication that this ramshackle cycling pack would draw crowds to throng France's rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes. But they did; and all thanks to a marketing ruse, cycling would never be the same again.

Through a highly sensitive exploration of key concepts and metaphors, Bernard Faure guides Western readers in appreciating some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese tradition of Chan Buddhism and its outgrowth, Japanese Zen. He focuses on Chan's insistence on "immediacy"--its denial of all traditional mediations, including scripture, ritual, good works--and yet shows how these mediations have always been present in Chan. Given this apparent duplicity in its discourse, Faure reveals how Chan structures its practice and doctrine on such mental paradigms as mediacy/immediacy, sudden/gradual, and center/margins.

This volume seeks to restore Vilfredo Pareto to his rightful place in the history of social and economic thought, bringing together studies by leading scholars to mark the centenary of his death in 1923. Assessing Pareto’s many contributions to the social sciences and his unique integration of the disciplines of sociology, politics, and economics, it addresses the relative neglect of Pareto’s work and explores both his continuing relevance to social research and the influence of his thought on subsequent developments in sociology and social theory. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the history of sociology and the importance of Pareto’s thought.

Since the end of the Cold War, globalization has brought new actors to the political arena. One of those which has attracted considerable attention in academic research is civil society or NGOs. Claudia Kissling addresses the topic of civil society participation in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The regime qualifies well for this objective since it features, given its characteristics as a treaty regime in the international security field, notable legal avenues for civil society participation. The study takes on a twofold perspective. It addresses the empirical question of whether civil society can contribute to the evolution of regimes in the security field, especially when it comes to security cooperation. It also questions whether civil society can, under certain conditions, contribute to the democratic quality of international decision-making. Here, empirical findings are used in order to test normative political theories on the legitimacy and democracy of global institutions.

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in philosophy made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship.