Treasury

Literature

The Testament of Mary

Tóibín once again hauntingly reminds us that truth is always at least partly subjective, and that individual truths merit the same respect and dignity as their authorized counterparts.

History

Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941

Moscow, The Fourth Rome

The most significant part of the book is the study of state ambition, self-representation, expressed in official rhetoric, cultural politics and writings of the Soviet intellectuals.

Philosophy

A Philosophical History of Love

Uninitiated undergraduates are in for a feast of nourishing ideas about love, whereas their professors will tend to grumble about the book’s smorgasbord character.

History

A Human History of the Mediterranean

The Great Sea

The role of the Mediterranean crossroads in bringing together the people from across it, and far beyond, is highlighted through a narrative style which ensures the place of the story in the history.

Literature

Ausgewählte Gedichte

Stufen

The general artistic lure of some of Hesse’s poems is fading away; however, they maintain an exceptionally powerful human appeal, especially where Hesse’s love of life emerges: Und jedes Lied und jedes Buch / Und jedes Bild ist ein Enthüllen.

Philosophy

An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Ethics

Apart from a polemical assault on other ethical doctrines and the politics they sustain, this book provides a sketch of Badiou’s ethics of ‘processes of truth’.

Art

The Looshaus

Once we have grasped that point there is no chance of being distracted by the verbal pyrotechnics in Loos’s polemics from understanding his architectural achievements.

Society

The Places In Between

Stewart’s self-reflexive narrative is very knowing of the fact that his trek through Afghanistan comes not so much after the emperor Babur as after international media coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom, the first phase of the War on Terror.

History

Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts

The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind

Pick sees both the necessity of the wartime militarization of psychoanalysis and the impossibility of accepting the theoretical principles upon which this was ostensibly based.

Philosophy

Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit

Das Recht der Freiheit

Honneth follows Durkheim instead of Marx in interpreting the capitalist market not as system of domination but as an institution that promises the general realization of individual interests and capacities.

Masterclass E. J. Dionne

Literature

Im Raum der Stille: Lektüren

Simply following Steiner’s train of thought constitutes a broadening of the reader's horizon

Culture

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Josipovici portrays modern English literature as ‘anecdotal’, ‘smooth’, ‘complacent’, ‘predictable’, ‘comforting’, ‘constricting’ the sum total leaving him with a feeling that ‘the world has been made smaller and meaner’.

Biography

Reading Huizinga

Huizinga can find revelation in the clash of armies, in Jan van Eyck’s signature as witness to Giovanni Arnolfini’s wedding or the shimmering blue and yellow of a Vermeer dress.