Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the `evolution' of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such `differences' are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of `unity', and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on `the author function'. This careful and lucid book presents a fresh and significant interpretation of the Essais and shows how Montaigne's work might profitably and illuminatingly be read in a `different' way.

Musica Naturalis delivers the first systematic account of speculative music theory as a discursive horizon for literary poetics. The title refers to the late medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose 1392 treatise on verse writing, L'Art de Dictier, famously casts verse as "natural music" in explicit distinction to song, which Deschamps defines as "artificial." Philipp Jeserich links the significance of the speculative branch of medieval musicology to literary theory and literary production, opening up a field of study that has been largely neglected. Beginning with Augustine and Boethius, he traces the discourse of speculative music theory to the late fifteenth century, giving attention to medieval Latin and vernacular sources. Ultimately, Jeserich calls for the conservatism of Deschamps' poetics and develops a new perspective on the poetics and poetry of the Grands rhetoriqueurs. Given Jeserich's reliance on the intellectual inheritance of late medieval French poetics and poetry, this book will appeal to English-speaking specialists of Old and Middle French, as well as scholars of the French Renaissance. It will also interest English language medievalists of several other disciplines: intellectual historians and specialists of English, as well as scholars of Italian and Iberian literature.

From Amazon to Tinder, from Google to Deliveroo, there is no facet of human life which the digital revolution has not streamlined and dematerialised. Its objective was to reduce the cost of physical interactions by forgoing face-to-face interactions, a direct result of the free-market shock of the 1980s, which sought to seamlessly expand the marketplace in every possible dimension. Today, we can be algorithmically entertained, educated, cared for and courted in a way which was impossible in the old industrial society, where institutions structured the social world. Today, these institutions have been replaced by monetised virtual contact.  As with the industrial revolution of the past, the digital revolution is creating a new economy and a new sensibility, bringing about a radical revaluation of society and its representations.  While obsessed with the search for an efficient management of human relations, the new digital capitalism gives rise to an irrational and impulsive Homo numericus prone to an array of addictive behaviours.  Far from producing a new agora, social media produce a radicalization of public debate in which hate-filled speech directed against adversaries becomes the norm.  The good news is that these outcomes are not inevitable. Technologies have not taken control of our lives. The digital revolution also offers an alternative path: one that leads to a world in which every word deserves to be listened to, without a transcendent truth hanging over it.  Are we able to seize the new opportunities opened up by the digital revolution without succumbing to its dark side?

In this moving and engaging book by one of France’s few female rabbis and leader of the country’s Liberal Jewish Movement, Delphine Horvilleur recounts eleven stories of loss, mourning, and consolation, collected during years spent caring for the dying and their loved ones. From Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat, to Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan, “the girls of Birkenau�; from Yitzhak Rabin, to Myriam, a New Yorker obsessed with planning her own funeral, to the author friend’s Ariane and her struggle with terminal illness, Horvilleur writes about death with intelligence, humour, and compassion. Rejecting the contemporary tendency to banish death from our thoughts, she encourages us to embrace its presence as a fundamental part of life.  Drawing from the Jewish tradition, Living with Our Dead is a profoundly humanist, universal, and hopeful book that celebrates life, love, memory and the power of storytelling to inspire and sustain us.

In 1857 the Gunzburgs arrived in Paris from Russia with their large family, a retinue of business staff and extensive domestic help: personal assistants, secretaries, tutors, wet-nurses and nannies, coachmen, ladies' companions, valets and maids, and even a kosher cook. For the Gunzburgs were practising Jews who observed every religious law whilst also launching themselves into Parisian high society. Napoleon III was on a mission to modernise France and the Gunzburgs were quick to avail themselves of opportunities that were opening up - particularly in banking. The family fortunes prospered through hard work, foresight and marriage. Soon the family was playing a leading role in the Jewish communities of both Russia and France, alongside their contemporaries or relatives the Ephrussis, the Rothschilds, the Brodskys, the Camondos and the Sassoons. The family lived through the tumultuous events of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and when family tragedy struck later, they returned the family base to Russia. They witnessed the Russian pogroms and revolution of 1905. Their sons fought in the armies of three countries in the First World War, only to go into exile as revolution gripped Russia in 1917-18. The outbreak of the Second World War saw some of the family once again on the road as refugees. Lorraine de Meaux discovers lost archives, letters and pictures, as she brings together distant family members in her story of the Gunzburgs.

A moving and intimate account of survival, resilience, and reconstruction. Paris. January 7, 2015, two terrorists attacked the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Philippe Lancon, seriously wounded, was among the survivors. This intense life experience upends his relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. It took him a year before he could return to writing, a year of frequent reconstructive surgeries, to work through his experiences and their aftermath. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lancon rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance and healing. Disturbance is not an essay on terrorism nor is it a witness's account of Charlie Hebdo, and it's certainly not a "feel good book." The attack and what followed make up a small portion of Lancon's narrative, which instead seeks to provide the most honest and intimate reproduction possible of the interior experience of a man who was a victim, who suffered a "war wound" in a country "at peace." Disturbance is a book about transformation, about one man's shifting relationship to time, to truth, and to his own body.

What is medieval religious drama, and what function does it serve in negotiating between the domains of theology and popular life? This book aims to answer these questions by studying three sets of these dramas: tenth-century Easter plays, twelfth-century Adam plays, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Passion plays.
However, the author's intent is not to present a genre history. Instead, he seeks to mediate between the historical development of the plays and a systematic unfolding of the archetypal structure within which the plays grasp salvation history and act it out. His theoretical approach is grounded in the work of Niklas Luhmann, which strongly emphasizes the priority of social functions over institutional structures.
The book's textual basis is truly European--including works from Germany, France, England, and Spain--and goes beyond "literary" texts to engage a range of sources from sparsely documented folk rituals to high medieval theology. These sources enable the author to encompass the complex structure of popular feasts and religious celebrations that centered on Easter. His methodological program--a systematically informed, structured analysis sensitive to the historical context--identifies recurrent patterns of distortion in these feasts and celebrations vis-a-vis their model, the chapters of Scripture dealing with Christ's death and resurrection.
Eschewing the conventional view of medieval theater as a depiction of medieval theology, the author convincingly shows that below their textual surfaces, the Easter theatrical and religious celebrations must have served as collective rituals of compensation in whose context the figure of Christ (often, specifically, the actor incarnating the figure) took over the role of the scapegoat. This demonstrates another of the book's major contributions, that a collaboration between medieval studies and contemporary cultural theory is not only viable but richly rewarding.

A COMPELLING AND ADDICTIVE PAGETURNER TO IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THIS SUMMER "He waits joylessly, patiently, and lets himself go. The stone house may end up being his grave. Who's doing what, who's chasing who? Who is the mouse, and who's the cat?" It's the middle of a long hot summer on the French Mediterranean shore and the town is full of tourists. Two tired cops who are being slowly devoured by dull routine and family worries, deal with the day's misdemeanours and petty complaints at the Perpignan police headquarters without a trace of enthusiasm. Out of the blue, a young Dutch woman is brutally murdered on the beach, and another disappears without a trace in the alleys of the city. A serial killer obsessed with Dutch women? The media goes wild. Gilles Sebag finds himself thrust into the middle of a diabolical game. If he intends to salvage something anything he will have to put aside his personal worries, forget his suspicions of his wife's unfaithfulness, ignore his heart murmur, get over his existential angst. WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: "Gilles Sebag is a superb detective. The world of crime is balanced with family life." - Lanna on Amazon "Subtle yet effective in building suspense." - Deb on Goodreads "If you're looking for a good read - whether on holiday or not - you can't do much better than this." - David on Amazon

As a young woman, Else made two promises to herself: to live life to the fullest and to have a child with every man she loves. You Are Not Like Other Mothers tells the stories of the men in her life―husbands, companions, lovers and emissaries of a world in which men repeatedly prove themselves inadequate. It also tells the stories of Peter, Bettina, and Angelika, Else’s three children.

Set during World War I and then the roaring twenties and the advent of Nazism and, for Else, exile in Bulgaria. But these dark years are also a time of experimentation, during which Else and the people in her life explore alternative modes of interpersonal relationships. All these stories and their characters are held together by the forceful figure of a woman who is larger than life.

But the indomitable Else will make a most human mistake when she tries to hide the real extent of the Nazi tragedy from her children and, instead of protecting them, she brings disaster down upon her family.

Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves behind, and diatribes for its corrosion of morality. In The Wisdom of Money, one of the world's great essayists guides us through the rich commentary that money has generated since ancient times-both the passions and the resentments-as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie. Bruckner begins with the worshippers and the despisers. Sometimes they are the same people-priests, for example, who venerate the poor from within churches of opulence and splendor. This hypocrisy endures in our secular world, he says, not least in his own France, where it is de rigueur even among the rich to feign indifference to money. It is better to speak plainly about money in the old American fashion, in Bruckner's view. A little more honesty would allow us to see through the myths of money's omnipotence but also the dangers of the aristocratic, ideological, and religious systems of thought that try to put money in its place. This does not mean we should emulate the mega-rich with their pathologies of consumption, competition, and narcissistic philanthropy. But we could do worse than defy three hundred years of derision from novelists and poets to embrace the unromantic bourgeois virtues of work, security, and moderate comfort. It is wise to have money, Bruckner tells us, and wise to think about it critically.

A portrait of Martin Heidegger as a man and a philosopher   In this biography of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), now available in English, historian Guillaume Payen synthesizes the connections between the German philosopher’s life and work. Critically, but without polemics, he creates a portrait of Heidegger in his time, using all available sources—lectures, letters, and the notorious “black notebooks.�   Payen chronicles Heidegger’s “changing destinies�: after the First World War, an uncompromising Catholicism gave way to a vigorous striving for a philosophical revolution—fertile ground for National Socialism. The book reflects a life of light and shadow. Heidegger was a great philosopher and teacher who cultivated friendships and love affairs with Jews but also was an anti-Semitic nationalist who lamented the “Judaization of German intellectual life.�

The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.

Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people.

We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Jean Tirole, a bold new agenda for the role of economics in society When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good. Economists are rewarded for writing technical papers in scholarly journals, not joining in public debates. But Tirole says we urgently need economists to engage with the many challenges facing society, helping to identify our key objectives and the tools needed to meet them. To show how economics can help us realize the common good, Tirole shares his insights on a broad array of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the Euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation. Providing a rich account of how economics can benefit everyone, Economics for the Common Good sets a new agenda for the role of economics in society.

The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema from 1957 to 1963, Eric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.

During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. "Cannibal Island" reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate.

These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the "kulaks" and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin's system of "special villages" worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels.

"Cannibal Island" challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin's punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia, but about every generation's capacity for brutality--including our own.

From the Nobel Prize-winning economist, a bold new agenda for the role of economics in society When Jean Tirole won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by strangers and asked to comment on current events far from his own research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect more deeply on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics can help us improve the shared lot of societies and humanity as a whole. To show how, Tirole shares his insights on a broad range of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation. Compelling and accessible, Economics for the Common Good sets a new agenda for the role of economics in society.

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion--one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment--the right to pursue happiness--become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy--and what might we do to escape this predicament? In "Perpetual Euphoria," Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness.

Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves--sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind--in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck.

A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, "Perpetual Euphoria" is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy."

How happiness became mandatory-and why we should reject the demand to "be happy" Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion-one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment-the right to pursue happiness-become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy-and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness. Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves-sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind-in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck. A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy."

The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema from 1957 to 1963, Eric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved. This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, "History and Memory" reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

No country in the Islamic Middle East presents as unique and distinguished a history and culture as Iran, which has managed to maintain its inherent characteristics - some of them from pre-Islamic times - over the course of centuries of changing dynasties and rulers. The Shiite faith, the official religion of Persia/Iran since 1501, stands in contrast to the Sunni Arabs who dominate the greater region. Iran endured European colonialism in the 20th century to a greater extent than any other Middle Eastern country, yet after the revolution of 1979, which made Iran the first Islamic Republic, Shiism and Persian culture remain intact. Monika Gronke presents the history of this country from the Islamization of the 7th century to the present in a clear and lively style, and describes the cultural, social, and religious developments that shaped Iran and the Iranian self-image.

A definitive biography of the great French essayist and thinker One of the most important writers and thinkers of the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) helped invent a literary genre that seemed more modern than anything that had come before. But did he do it, as he suggests in his Essays, by retreating to his chateau and stoically detaching himself from his violent times? Philippe Desan overturns this long standing myth by showing that Montaigne was constantly connected to and concerned with realizing his political ambitions-and that the literary and philosophical character of the Essays largely depends on them. Desan shows how Montaigne conceived of each edition of the Essays as an indispensable prerequisite to the next stage of his public career. It was only after his political failure that Montaigne took refuge in literature, and even then it was his political experience that enabled him to find the right tone for his genre. The most comprehensive and authoritative biography of Montaigne yet written, this sweeping narrative offers a fascinating new picture of his life and work.

A revolutionary account of the ancient Greek economy This comprehensive introduction to the ancient Greek economy revolutionizes our understanding of the subject and its possibilities. Alain Bresson is one of the world's leading authorities in the field, and he is helping to redefine it. Here he combines a thorough knowledge of ancient sources with innovative new approaches grounded in recent economic historiography to provide a detailed picture of the Greek economy between the last century of the Archaic Age and the closing of the Hellenistic period. Focusing on the city-state, which he sees as the most important economic institution in the Greek world, Bresson addresses all of the city-states rather than only Athens. An expanded and updated English edition of an acclaimed work originally published in French, the book offers a groundbreaking new theoretical framework for studying the economy of ancient Greece; presents a masterful survey and analysis of the most important economic institutions, resources, and other factors; and addresses some major historiographical debates. Among the many topics covered are climate, demography, transportation, agricultural production, market institutions, money and credit, taxes, exchange, long-distance trade, and economic growth. The result is an unparalleled demonstration that, unlike just a generation ago, it is possible today to study the ancient Greek economy as an economy and not merely as a secondary aspect of social or political history. This is essential reading for students, historians of antiquity, and economic historians of all periods.