Accompanying this wealth of detailed information are over 100 black and white photographs, illustrations and maps, plus a list of Azerbaijani proverbs, suggestions for further reading, a chronology of Azerbaijani historical events, and a discography.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau's native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau's ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world. Though it was precisely what got Rousseau's book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer James Hill of the "New York Times" chooses fifty of his photographs and describes the stories and emotions behind those pictures and the artistic and emotional choices shaped during the intense kaleidoscope of those experiences. From the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the Royal Wedding in 2011, to taking the first portrait of the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, to the death of Pope John Paul II, Hill has witnessed some of recent history's most poignant moments, and describes the fine balance demanded of a photojournalist between professional detachment and personal engagement.

Monumental mosaics were created throughout the USSR, but they played a special role in its capital. While in other Soviet cities and republics monumental mosaics became common in the 1960s, in Moscow mosaic was used for art-deco works and social realist 'pictures'. The entire history of Soviet art is thus reflected in Moscow's metro stations, palaces of culture, military museums, hospitals, schools, and prefabricated houses. Today, many of these works are disappearing before our eyes, victims of destruction or dismantling; the majority are not listed as under state protection, and a great number of their authors are unknown. This book collects 140 Soviet-era mosaics and arranges them in chronological order. It contains four main sections - Art Deco, Socialist Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism - and includes a list of 295 mosaics that have been identified. This guide shows well-known works by Aleksander Deyneka, Pavel Korin, Boris Chernyshev, Evgeny Ablin, Yury Korolev, and Leonid Polishchuk side by side with mosaics by artists whose names were for a long time absent from the history of art and architecture. The idea for it came from American photographer James Hill, who spent three years seeking out and photographing works of Soviet monumental art that have not received the attention they deserve and that in the post-Soviet period have often been dismissed as propaganda.

George Berkeley’s doctrine of notions is often disparaged or dismissed. In a systematic interpretation and positive reconstruction of the doctrine, James Hill presents Berkeley’s understanding of the inner sphere and self-awareness, and reassesses the widely held view of Berkeley as an empiricist. Examining the development of Berkeley’s philosophy from the early notebooks to the late Siris, Hill sets out how knowledge by notion involves a radical rejection of the perceptual model of self-cognition and of the attempt to frame our knowledge of the inner by analogy with the outer. He points to Berkeley’s divergence from the assumption among rationalists and empiricists that we know our selves and our mental acts by idea, or by an immediate presentation before the mind. Weaving together Berkeley’s conception of the intellect, conceptual thought, mathematics, ethics and theology in the light of the doctrine of notions, Hill invites us to treat Berkeley’s philosophy of mind as distinct from the empiricist tradition. This cutting edge reflection on the doctrine of notions is essential reading for students and scholars specialising in Berkeley as well as early modern accounts of the self, perception and God.