The authors bring their wit and monstrous imaginations to play across the entire history of sport, with chapters ranging from the Greek athletic ideal and its perversions to the Nazi Olympics of 1936 and the use of drugs, alcohol and visionary states of being.

Why the world's most resilient dictatorships are products of violent revolution Revolution and Dictatorship explores why dictatorships born of social revolution-such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam-are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Although most revolutionary governments begin weak, they challenge powerful domestic and foreign actors, often bringing about civil or external wars. These counterrevolutionary wars pose a threat that can destroy new regimes, as in the cases of Afghanistan and Cambodia. Among regimes that survive, however, prolonged conflicts give rise to a cohesive ruling elite and a powerful and loyal coercive apparatus. This leads to the downfall of rival organizations and alternative centers of power, such as armies, churches, monarchies, and landowners, and helps to inoculate revolutionary regimes against elite defection, military coups, and mass protest-three principal sources of authoritarian breakdown. Looking at a range of revolutionary and nonrevolutionary regimes from across the globe, Revolution and Dictatorship shows why governments that emerge from violent conflict endure.

"There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: 'In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should be allowed to fall into decay and ruin.'Gardening, Lucan and Gray believe, is 'little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty', and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that'nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden.' For them the garden is a place of 'agony, self-doubt and betrayal.' They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener.And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned.The book abounds with piercing, pricking truths.The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns.The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes.Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs(they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind."

In architecture, composition refers to the conception of a building according to principles of regularity and hierarchy, or according to the principles of obtaining equilibrium. However, it is not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the notion of composition becomes truly associated with architectural conception, notably under the influence of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and his statement on the Marche a suivre dans la composition d'un project quelconque [Procedure to be followed in the composition of any project]. The concept quickly erodes during the twentieth century, with the adoption of neutral architectural devices, the use of aggregative processes, and the adoption of "objective" operations, all of which can be understood as an attempt to move beyond compositional principles. In Composition, Non-Composition, Jacques Lucan invites his readers to consider this novel historical perspective of architectural theory. The author describes the interaction of ideas that often clash with one another, with some that fade away as others emerge, thus offering invaluable keys to understanding contemporary architecture. Although this book is primarily addressed to students of architecture, it will also appeal to architects, historians of architecture, as well as to the interested public.

Pluralism by Default explores sources of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and beyond. Lucan Way proposes that pluralism in "new democracies" is often grounded less in democratic leadership or emerging civil society and more in the failure of authoritarianism. Dynamic competition frequently emerges because autocrats lack the state capacity to steal elections, impose censorship, or repress opposition. In fact, the same institutional failures that facilitate political competition may also thwart the development of stable democracy.

Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus, 39-65 CE), son of wealthy M. Annaeus Mela and nephew of Seneca, was born at Corduba (Cordova) in Spain and was brought as a baby to Rome. In 60 CE at a festival in Emperor Nero's honour Lucan praised him in a panegyric and was promoted to one or two minor offices. But having defeated Nero in a poetry contest he was interdicted from further recitals or publication, so that three books of his epic "The Civil War" were probably not issued in 61 when they were finished. By 65 he was composing the tenth book but then became involved in the unsuccessful plot of Piso against Nero and, aged only twenty-six, by order took his own life.

Quintilian called Lucan a poet "full of fire and energy and a master of brilliant phrases." His epic stood next after Virgil's in the estimation of antiquity. Julius Caesar looms as a sinister hero in his stormy chronicle in verse of the war between Caesar and the Republic's forces under Pompey, and later under Cato in Africa--a chronicle of dramatic events carrying us from Caesar's fateful crossing of the Rubicon, through the Battle of Pharsalus and death of Pompey, to Caesar victorious in Egypt. The poem is also called "Pharsalia."

In the same style as The Decadent Cookbook a nd The Decadent Gardener, this book sees the hedonists Medla r Lucan and Durian Gray laying bare the transgressive nature of another bourgeois passion - travel. '