The Elgar Companion to Information Economics dexterously navigates this interdisciplinary field of research which celebrates the crucial contribution of information to decision making, market dynamics, and economic well-being. Offering a wealth of conceptual analysis, this erudite Companion embarks on an intellectual journey exploring how the fundamentals of information economics explain rapid developments in the information landscape. Featuring contributions from acclaimed international scholars, chapters expertly analyse the role of information for economic processes. From asymmetric information to AI and digital influencers, they examine the latest developments in research and the practical problems raised by recent innovative technologies while discussing important policy implications. Major themes such as information and disinformation, inequality, information asymmetry, innovation, informational influence, payment and value are examined, and special focus is given to the contrast between scarcity and abundance of information. A number of pressing issues in the processing of information are also identified. This authoritative Companion will serve as a fundamental resource for policymakers, economists, sociologists, information scientists, communication scholars, and political scientists. Postgraduate students and academic researchers interested in the economics of innovation, industrial economics, technology and ICT will similarly benefit from this Companion.

On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixth-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body, wheelchair-bound in a rehab facility and endlessly frustrated by his newfound physical limitations. As he resisted the overbearing ministrations of the nurses helping him along the road to recovery, Raban began to reflect not only on the measure of his own life but the extraordinary story of his parents’ early marriage, conducted for three years by letter while his father fought in the Second World War.

'A beautiful, compelling memoir. ... Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement" – Ian McEwan On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body. Learning to use a wheelchair in a rehab facility outside Seattle and resisting the ministrations of the nurses overseeing his recovery, Raban began to reflect upon the measure of his own life in the face of his own mortality. Together with the chronicle of his recovery is the extraordinary story of his parents’ marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War. Jonathan Raban engages profoundly and candidly with some of the biggest questions at the heart of what it means to be alive, laying bare the human capacity to withstand trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humour that persist despite it. Father and Son, the final work from the peerless man of letters, is a tremendous, continent-sweeping story of love and resilience in the face of immense loss.

From Jonathan Raban, the award--winning author of Bad Land and Passage to Juneau, comes this quirky and insightful story of what can happen when one can and does go home again.

For the past thirty years, George Grey has been a ship bunker in the fictional west African nation of Montedor, but now he's returning home to England-to a daughter who's a famous author he barely knows, to a peculiar new friend who back in the sixties was one of England's more famous singers, and to the long and empty days of retirement during which he's easy prey to the melancholy of memories, all the more acute since the woman he loves is still back in Africa. Witty, charming and masterly crafted, Foreign Land is an exquisitely moving tale of awkward relationships and quiet redemption.

'Jonathan Raban is the only person I listen to in matters of travel and books and writing in general. Reading him, talking to him as I have over fifty years, he has made my work better and me happier.' Paul Theroux 'For Love and Money ... is as good a book as there is about the writing life. Delighted that it will be safeguarded in print by Eland.' Tim Hannigan This collection of writing undertaken for love and money is about books and travel, and makes for an engrossing and candid exploration of what it means to live from writing. Jonathan Raban weighs up the advantages of maintaining an independent spirit against problems of insolvency and self-worth, confesses to travel as an escape from the blank page, ponders the true art of the book review, admires the role of the literary editor and remembers with affection and hilarity events from his eccentric life at the heart of literary London. Reading it is like embarking on a humane, rigorous and witty conversation.

'Jonathan Raban is simply one of the great writers of non-fiction at work today. I hold his work in awe.' Robert Macfarlane 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the Street People and the Air People in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and down-at-heel native Americans. Having outgrown his minute rented New York apartment, he heads for Guntersville, Alabama, where he settles for a few months as a good ol' boy in a cabin on the lake with a 'rented' elderly lab. From there he flies to the promise of Seattle, discovering its thrusting but alienated Asian community and thence to the watery lowlife of Key West. The result is a breathtaking observation of the States - a travelogue, a social history and a love letter in one.

'Jonathan Raban is one of the world's greatest living travel writers.' William Dalrymple 'The best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States' Jan Morris, Independent Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America - with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy - and come to know something of its soul. The journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself with an irresistible emotional intensity as he tries to give shape to the river and the story - finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.

'A valuable book and a necessary one. One of the funniest and cleverest voyages on record.' Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman 'The finest writer afloat since Conrad.' Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian 'Unfailingly witty and entertaining.' Salman Rushdie Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions of the people and communities he encounters. As he faces his terror of racing water, eddies, offshore sandbars and ferries on a collision course, so he navigates the complex and turbulent waters of his own middle age. Coasting is a fearless attempt to discover the meaning of belonging and of his English homeland.

'Of all his generation's travellers, Jonathan Raban is the most sophisticated, writing with a subtle and imaginative brilliance.' Colin Thubron 'One of the most humane and visionary of all travel writers.' Jeremy Seal Into Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained - and cultural innovation lagged miles behind economic change. Raban's gift for friendship introduces us to a series of memorable individuals - rich and poor - set against the feel, the smells, the sounds and the nuances of Arabia.

The innovative and classic PHOTODARIUM desk calendar makes its 8th annual appearance with a new selection of instant photographs, one for every day of the year. A truly international selection, all taken by photographers, both professional and amateur from around the world. This photo-tear-off calendar is set to delight everyone who buys or is given one. A new picture every day and each one accompanied by a short text or comment on the reverse of each photo, that outlines the feelings or thoughts of the photographer, as the shot was taken. Together with a note on the film used and the photographer`s name and home city. The photos have a high lacquer finish and the calendar comes complete with its own stand. Everything is contained in a sturdy collector`s box. An ideal and very unusual present and an eye catching and useful decorative addition for any desk, window sill, bedside table .... wherever!

Jonathan Raban's enthralling journey into the history of the Great Plains of Montana – the least populated, most uncharted region of the United States – to uncover the heart and soul of the country, with a new introduction from Jane Smiley. Bringing to life the extraordinary landscape of the prairie and the homesteaders whose dreams foundered there, and reaching through history to the present day, Bad Land uncovers the dangerous legacy of American innocence gone sour. 'Bad Land should be recognized as a blazing classic' – Sunday Telegraph

The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is a very complicated sea-route. Parts of it are open ocean, parts of it no wider than a modest river, and it has been in continuous use for several thousand years. Its aboriginal past - still tantalizingly close to hand - puts the inside passaged on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. This book is much more than a book about a sea voyage; it is about Jonathan Raban's journey home to his father who is dying; about his crumbling relationship with his wife and also about the historical journey of the maddening Vancouver in his search for the North West Passage.

This book argues that at the core of legal philosophys principal debates there is essentially one issue judicial impartiality. Keeping this issue to the forefront, Raban's approach sheds much light on many difficult and seemingly perplexing jurisprudential debates. Modern Legal Theory and Judicial Impartiality offers a fresh and penetrating examination of two of the most celebrated modern legal theorists: HLA Hart and Ronald Dworkin. The book explains the relations between these two scholars and other theorists and schools of thought (including Max Weber, Lon Fuller, and the law and economics movement), offering both novices and experts an innovative and lucid look at modern legal theory. The book is written in an engaging and conversational style, tackling highly sophisticated issues in a concise and accessible manner. Undergraduates in jurisprudence and legal theory, as well as more advanced readers, will find it clear and challenging.

There is a growing body of work examining the 'consequences', or more accurately the inter-relationships between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and society at the microsocial (individual, household) level. The vast majority of this work has so far been focused on the US and the subsequent publications have consequently provided predominantly US-centred analyses. This book will re-dress this balance by providing analyses of the situation in Europe and is associated states and placing the analyses in the context of both European and International research and policy debates. The book uses data from a range of European countries as well as comparisons with Asia and the USA. Students and academics from a range of disciplines including sociology, business and management and new media will find this book to be a valuable addition to their reading lists.

There is a growing body of work examining the a ~consequencesa (TM), or more accurately the inter-relationships between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and society at the microsocial (individual, household) level. The vast majority of this work has so far been focused on the US and the subsequent publications have consequently provided predominantly US-centred analyses.

This book will re-dress this balance by providing analyses of the situation in Europe and is associated states and placing the analyses in the context of both European and International research and policy debates. The book uses data from a range of European countries as well as comparisons with Asia and the USA.

Students and academics from a range of disciplines including sociology, business and management and new media will find this book to be a valuable addition to their reading lists.

This book argues that at the core of legal philosophys principal debates there is essentially one issue judicial impartiality. Keeping this issue to the forefront, Raban's approach sheds much light on many difficult and seemingly perplexing jurisprudential debates. Modern Legal Theory and Judicial Impartiality offers a fresh and penetrating examination of two of the most celebrated modern legal theorists: HLA Hart and Ronald Dworkin. The book explains the relations between these two scholars and other theorists and schools of thought (including Max Weber, Lon Fuller, and the law and economics movement), offering both novices and experts an innovative and lucid look at modern legal theory. The book is written in an engaging and conversational style, tackling highly sophisticated issues in a concise and accessible manner. Undergraduates in jurisprudence and legal theory, as well as more advanced readers, will find it clear and challenging.

'A beautiful, compelling memoir. ... Father and Son is an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement" – Ian McEwan On 11 June 2011, three days short of his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban suffered a stroke which left him unable to use the right side of his body, wheelchair-bound in a rehab facility and endlessly frustrated by his newfound physical limitations. As he resisted the overbearing ministrations of the nurses helping him along the road to recovery, Raban began to reflect not only on the measure of his own life but the extraordinary story of his parents’ early marriage, conducted for three years by letter while his father fought in the Second World War. Jonathan Raban engages profoundly and honestly with the biggest questions at the heart of what it means to be alive, laying bare the human capacity to adapt to trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humour that persist despite it. The result is Father and Son, a tremendous story of resilience in the face of loss.

It took Kinglake seven years before he had finished crafting this `lively, brilliant and rather insolent tale. The physical details of the journey, undertaken in 1834 across the Balkan frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, through Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus into the Near eastern cities of Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus, are never as significant as the conversations, chance encounters and attitudes of the author. Packed full of an infectious charm and a youthful delight at the world, it is above all things funny as it lampoons the pomposity of earnest, middle?aged travellers seeking to establish themselves as professional authorities.

A entrancing travelogue from the late Anglo-American master of letters, Jonathan Raban. Reissued with a new introduction from Robert Macfarlane, Passage to Juneau is an account of Raban's voyage from Seattle to the Alaskan capital by boat, and the devastating news that awaits him when he returns to dry land. This is extraordinary travel writing, defying at every turns the constrains of genre. 'Raban at his best' – Ian McEwan

Why are we creative? Why are we not? In The Dialectic of Creativity, Hermann Vaske explores these questions in conversations with Marina Abramovic, Vivienne Westwood, David Hockney, Georg Baselitz, Bjoerk, Jeff Koons, Zaha Hadid, Christo, Yoko Ono, Damien Hirst, Jim Jarmusch, Shirin Neshat, David Bowie, and many more of the most influential creatives of our time, identifying the stimuli as well as the beta blockers, the killers of creativity: Spirituality, sex, money, fear, nurture, ambition versus censorship, self-censorship, bureaucracy, compromise, distraction, gatekeepers. Often it is those very blockages, the threats to creativity that allow it to thrive. A dialectical synthesis of opposites. Today, as we are facing an existential threat to our planet, it is time to come up with new ideas, more creative than ever. The Dialectic of Creativity explores all facets of creativity-artistic, intellectual, philosophical, and scientific. It is accompanied by a film trilogy and an exhibition.