‘Why can you not be friends anymore?’

It was the story of his country, he supposed. Perhaps they could have been friends. Perhaps they were once. The reasons were complex, full of feeling, disappointment, resentment. And, of course, betrayal. This was the Middle East after all.

Avi Dahan, a retired detective mourning his beloved wife in Tel Aviv, and Khalid Mansour, a Palestinian doctor confronting the precarious reality of living in Gaza City, are still reeling from the political fallout that jeopardised their delicate friendship. When a mysterious corpse scarred by history and forbidden love shows up in Khalid’s emergency room, he reaches out to Avi for help. Though the detective is the only one who might be able to assist, he is the last person on earth to agree …

The stage is set for Andrew Brown’s unforgettable new novel, The Bitterness of Olives.

Did it really matter? In the face of chaos, was it important how she had died? That was the guidance he needed from Avi now. He needed to understand that question: did it matter anymore? Was it of any significance, how you died in a war?

Thing a Week 2010 is a short story and poetry anthology that resulted from an ambitious project in 2010 to write, edit, and polish a short story every single week for a year. Stories include some hard and soft science fiction, fantasy settings, modern interpersonal drama, and many other thrilling settings and plots in the form of 52 short stories spanning one to twenty pages each.

This edited collection approaches the field of social robotics from the perspective of a cultural ecology, fostering a deeper examination of the reach of robotic technology into the lived experience of diverse human populations, as well as the impact of human cultures on the development and design of these social agents. To address the broad topic of Cultural Robotics, the book is sectioned into three focus areas: Human Futures, Assistive Technologies, and Creative Platforms and their Communities. The Human Futures section includes chapters on the histories and future of social robot morphology design, sensory and sonic interaction with robots, technology ethics, material explorations of embodiment, and robotic performed sentience. The Assistive Technologies section presents chapters from community-led teams, and researchers working to adopt a strengths-based approach to designing assistive technologies for those with disability or neurodivergence. Importantly, this section contains work written by authors belonging to those communities. Creative Platforms and their Communities looks to the creative cross-disciplinary researchers adopting robotics within their art practices, those contributing creatively to more traditional robotics research, and the testing of robotics in non-traditional platforms such as museum and gallery spaces. Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and their Emergent Cultural Ecologies makes a case for the development of social robotics to be increasingly informed by community-led transdisciplinary research, to be decentralised and democratised, shaped by teams with a diversity of backgrounds, informed by both experts and non-experts, and tested in both traditional and non-traditional platforms. In this way, the field of cultural robotics as an ecological approach to encompassing the widest possible spectrum of human experience in the development of social robotics can be advanced.   

This collection gives broad and up-to-date results in the research and development of materials characterization and processing. Coverage is well-rounded from minerals, metals, and materials characterization and developments in extraction to the fabrication and performance of materials. In addition, topics as varied as structural steels to electronic materials to plant-based composites are explored. The latest research presented in this wide area make this book both timely and relevant to the materials science field as a whole. The book explores scientific processes to characterize materials using modern technologies, and focuses on the interrelationships and interdependence among processing, structure, properties, and performance of materials. Topics covered include ferrous materials, non-ferrous materials, minerals, ceramics, clays, soft materials, method development, processing, corrosion, welding, solidification, composites, extraction, powders, nanomaterials, advanced materials, and several others.

This bestselling text enables beginning researchers to organise and evaluate the research they read, and to plan and implement small scale research projects of their own. It gives structured, practical guidance on: the development of a research question techniques of data collection qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis the writing and dissemination of research. The authors present research as a principled activity that begins with the establishing and structuring of theoretical and empirical fields and research findings as serving to ask questions of educational practice rather than directing it. This revised and updated second edition includes a new chapter dealing with the complex issue of research ethics. It also includes consideration of digital technologies and new media, both as settings of research and research tools, the chapters on qualitative and quantitative analysis have been expanded and the annotated bibliography updated. The authors have been active researchers in educational studies for more than twenty years. They have also supervised numerous doctoral and masters dissertations and taught research methods programmes in various higher education institutions around the world as well as in the Institute of Education, University of London.

This book offers a fresh interpretation of the relationship between the church, society and religion across five centuries of change. Andrew Brown examines how the teachings of an increasingly universal Church were applied at a local level and how social change shaped the religious practices of the laity. His approach encompasses the structures of corporate religion, the devotional practices surrounding cults and saints, the effects of literacy (not least on the development of heresy), and how gender, class and political power affected and fragmented the expression of religion.

This book examines the relationship between critical realism and Marxism. The authors argue that critical realism and Marxism have much to gain from each other. This is the first book to address the controversial debates between critical realism and Marxism, and it does so from a wide range if disciplines. The authors argue that whilst one book cannot answer all the questions about the relationship between critical realism and Marxism, this book does provide some significant answers. In doing so, Critical Realism and Marxism reveals a potentially fruitful relationship; deepens our understanding of the social world and makes an important contribution towards eliminating the barbarism that accompanies contemporary capitalism.

This is a collection of documents on English history. Editorial comment is directed towards making sources intelligible rather than drawing conclusions from them. Full account has been taken of modern textual criticism. A general introduction to each volume portrays the character of the period under review and critical bibliographies have been added to assist further investigation. Documents collected include treaties, personal letters, statutes, military dispatches, diaries, declarations, newspaper articles, government and cabinet proceedings, orders, acts, sermons, pamphlets, agricultural instructions, charters, grants, guild regulations and voting records. Volumes include genealogical tables, lists of officials, chronologies, diagrams, graphs and maps.

Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad met in their twenties in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence. From their first meeting, a strong intellectual friendship was born between the French philosopher and the activist from the colony, nourished by the same desire to understand the world in order to change it.   The work of both men was driven by the necessity of putting knowledge to use, whether by unveiling the relations of domination that structured life in Algeria or by opening emancipatory perspectives for the Algerian people. Colonies were of course a customary site of ethnographic work, but Bourdieu and Sayad refused to sacrifice scientific rigour to political expediency, even as Algeria descended deeper into war. Indeed, the act of understanding as a political commitment to the transformation of society lay at the heart of their project.   In this remarkable book, drawing on the public and private archives of these brilliant thinkers and interviews with their contemporaries, Amín Pérez rediscovers the anticolonial origins of their pathbreaking social thought. Bourdieu and Sayad, he argues, forged another way of doing politics, laying the foundations of a revolutionary pedagogy, not just for anticolonial liberation but for true social emancipation. 

The global triumph of democracy was announced thirty years ago, promising an age of consensus in which the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. Today, these grand hopes have been destroyed, and the era touted as new and exceptional has turned out to be remarkably similar to the old order – but not simply due to the aggression of external forces. Instead, we must look to the nature of consensus itself, which, in the view of leading radical philosopher Jacques Rancière, is revealed as a violent, absolutized capitalist machine whose output is ever more inequality, exclusion and hate. This book delivers a frank and piercing assessment of the globalised capitalist consensus. The invasion of Iraq, the riots on Capitol Hill and the rise of the European far right all provide evidence of the consummation of consensual realism, as does the current state-sanctioned racism which exploits the disenchanted progressive tradition and is led by an intelligentsia that claims to be left-wing. At the same time, Rancière also praises the dynamism of social movements which affirm the power of the assembly of equals and its capacity for worldmaking: autonomous protest collectives have proven themselves capable of opening breaches in the consensual order and challenging the post-1989 system of domination.

We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved?  In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men.  In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them – in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women’s liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries – and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France – are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.

From the forests of Yellowstone to the steppes of the Haut-Var, the French philosopher and environmentalist Baptiste Morizot invites us to develop a different relationship to nature: to become detectives of nature and to follow the footprints of the many wonderful and extraordinary animals with which we share the Earth. By deciphering and interpreting an animal's footprints and other signs, we gradually discover not only which animal it is, but the animal's motives too. Through this kind of 'philosophical tracking', we come to see the world from the animal's point of view, to learn to live in this world from the perspective of another species. We begin to let go of our anthropocentric point of view and to recapture the kind of perspective that our ancestors once had when they had no choice but to adopt an animal point of view if they wanted to survive. In short, by following animal trails, we learn how to pay increased attention to the living world around us and how to cohabit this world with others, thereby enriching our understanding of other species, of the world we share with them and of ourselves.

Cape Town is experiencing a wave of skilfully executed cash-in-transit heists, and Captain Eberard Februarie is brought in to crack the case. There are few leads to go on, and the gang always seems to be a step ahead of the cops, raising suspicions of a leak from the inside.

Andile Xaba lives a double life, leading a crew of heist men and hiding his activities from his girlfriend and mother. He knows the police are on his tail, and when a job goes wrong, fault lines start emerging in the gang. They cannot afford any more mistakes.

In this explosive new crime thriller, Andrew Brown pits his haunted detective against the most elusive enemy he has yet faced. While dealing with his own demons, problems with his ex-wife and daughter, and a colonel with a history in the apartheid police force, Eberard moves ever closer to a dramatic showdown.

The Heist Men is a thrilling, poignant triumph, once again revealing Andrew Brown as a vital voice on the local crime fiction scene. A novel sure to satisfy diehard fans and win plenty of new ones.

The teaching and learning of music around the world have evolved in diverse ways as social, industrial, and cultural developments have influenced the ways humans understand, organize, and collectivize music education. Revolutions in Music Education: Historical and Social Explorations chronicles major changes in music education that continue to shape practices in the twenty-first century. The contributors investigate the organizational, pedagogical, and strategic approaches to teaching music across the ages. The universality of music is manifest in the chapters of this book, providing meaning and insight from all geographic, socio-political, and economic contexts.

The Middle East, often referred to as the cradle of the three monotheisms, is saturated with symbolism. Situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a land marked by the rich confluence of religions and peoples.  At the same time, it has been the focal point of endemic tensions and conflicts, many of which stretch back into the mists of time.  In this new history of the Middle East, Jean-Pierre Filiu looks beyond religion and focuses his attention on the processes by which powers and their areas of domination were established over time.  His starting point is 395 AD, the year when the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western halves: at that point, the Middle East emerged as a specific entity, freed from external domination, and a Christianity of the East asserted itself, turned towards Byzantium rather than towards Rome.  From this point on, Filiu follows a strictly Middle Eastern dynamics, tracing the rise and fall of powers linked to the three principal poles of Egypt, Syria and Iraq and recounting the procession of empires, invasions and assertions of imperialist ambition that have characterized the region since then.  The book closes in 2022, when the men and women of the Middle East are still struggling for the right to define their destiny by telling their stories in their own voices. This magisterial and up-to-date history of the Middle East will be essential reading for students and scholars of history and politics and for anyone interested in history of one of the most important and contested regions of the modern world.

With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and the world’s second largest economy, China is a major player in the world today, and yet many in the West know very little about contemporary China. This book provides a clear, authoritative and up-to-date history of China since 1949, drawing on extensive research to describe and explain the key developments and to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding this twenty-first-century superpower. In contrast to many commentators who overstate the novelty of the Communist regime, Guiheux emphasizes instead its complex political heritage, highlighting the many continuities it shares with the reformers and revolutionaries of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the ability of China’s authoritarian regime to transform the economy and society is key to understanding its breakneck trajectory of modernization – an ability that, as Guiheux explains, far outweighed the importance and effectiveness of Mao’s utopian vision. Guiheux also aims to ‘de-exoticize’ China. While not on the path of a Western-style modernity, China has experienced the same phenomena that have characterized every historical process of modernization: industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization and globalization. This expertly researched history of the People’s Republic of China will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese history and politics, and for anyone interested in contemporary China.

Having learnt that a new railway in India has made it theoretically possible to travel all the way around the globe in no more than eighty days, Phileas Fogg, a wealthy and fastidious London gentleman, makes a wager of £20,000 with his Reform Club associates that he can achieve this hitherto unheard-of feat, and, accompanied by his French valet Jean Passepartout, boards a train for Dover the very same evening. Pursued on their epic journey by a Scotland Yard policeman who has mistaken Fogg for a bank robber, the intrepid voyagers face a race against time as they traverse a range of exotic and sometimes hazardous landscapes and make use of any and every mode of transport available to them – including elephants – in order to achieve their goal. A huge commercial success on first publication in 1872, Jules Verne’s classic adventure story has been adapted numerous times for the stage and the screen, as well as inspiring many real-life adventurers who have sought to emulate Fogg’s audacious odyssey. Now presented in a brand-new translation.

In Bound by Muscle, Andrew Brown details the lives and achievements of two physiologists, Archibald Vivian Hill (1886-1977) and Otto Fritz Meyerhof (1884-1951). Hill and Meyerhof shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to metabolic changes underlying muscle activity. Bound by Muscle describes how Hill and Meyerhof's lives and careers intersected and diverged and how their work changed the course of biological science. Bound by Muscle is organized chronologically. The first four chapters consider Hill and Meyerhof's childhoods and early careers; subsequent chapters address the Nobel Prize nomination and award and how their lives were affected by the World Wars. Bound by Muscle details Hill and Meyerhof's scientific breakthroughs and professional accomplishments. The book also examines the historical context that shaped their work and how the two men differed. Hill embodied the pragmatic style of British science. He became an outspoken critic of fascism as well as an effective humanitarian. As a senior scientist, he played major roles in preparing Great Britain for World War II. In contrast, Meyerhof was shy and philosophical. A non-observant Jew, he was reluctant to leave his superb laboratory in Heidelberg as the Nazi threat became apparent. His dramatic eventual escape is described in detail for the first time. Throughout, Bound by Muscle reflects on how individual differences and historical events have shaped the trajectory of science.