In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England's transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley, including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and genders.Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive ""theater-finance nexus"" at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to public life in eighteenth-century London.

Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia's authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves. But where did this concept come from? What analytical and ideological pillars does it stand on? What is at stake in using this term today? The Afterlife of the 'Soviet Man' addresses all these questions and even explains why - at least in its contemporary usage - this concept should be abandoned altogether.

Few philosophers are more often referred to and more often misunderstood than Machiavelli. He was truly a product of the Renaissance, and he was as much a revolutionary in the field of political philosophy as Leonardo or Michelangelo were in painting and sculpture. He watched his native Florence lose its independence to the French, thanks to poor leadership from the Medici successors to the great Lorenzo (Il Magnifico). Machiavelli was a keen observer of people, and he spent years studying events and people before writing his famous books. Descended from minor nobility, Machiavelli grew up in a household that was run by a vacillating and incompetent father. He was well educated and smart, and he entered government service as a clerk. He eventually became an important figure in the Florentine state but was defeated by the deposed Medici and Pope Julius II. He was tortured but eventually freed by the restored Medici. No longer employed, he retired to his home to write the books for which he is remembered. Machiavelli had seen the best and the worst of human nature, and he understood how the world operated. He drew his observations from life, and he was appropriately cynical in his writing, given what he had personally experienced. He was an outstanding writer, and his work remains fascinating nearly 500 years later.

On 14 April 1912, less than a week into a transatlantic trip from Southampton to New York, the largest luxury cruise liner in the world struck an iceberg off the coast of Labrador, causing the hull to buckle. The massive 50,000 ton ship hailed as 'unsinkable' was soon slipping into the cold Atlantic Ocean, the crew and passengers scrambling to launch lifeboats before being sucked into the deep. Of the 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died, making the sinking one of the deadliest for a single ship up to that time. The sinking has captured the public imagination ever since, in part because of the scale of the tragedy, but also because the ship represented in microcosm Edwardian society, with the super-rich sharing the vessel with poor migrants seeking a new life in North America. Other factors, such as why there were only enough lifeboats to hold half the passengers, also caused controversy and led to changes in maritime safety. In later years many survivors told their stories to the press, and Titanic celebrates these accounts. A final chapter examines the shipwreck today, which has been visited underwater by explorers, scientists and film-makers, and many artifacts recovered as the old liner steadily disintegrates. Titanic offers a compact, insightful photographic history of the sinking and its aftermath in 180 authentic photographs.